If you wish that this revolution should not have the same end, beware
of abject Materialism, degrading Sensualism, gross Socialism, of
besotted Communism; of all these doctrines of flesh and blood, of meat
and drink, of hunger and thirst, of wages and traffic, which these
corruptors of the soul of the People preach to you, exclusively, as
the sole thought, the sole hope, as the only duty, and only end of
man! They will soon make you slaves of ease, serfs of your desires.
Are you willing to have inscribed on the tomb of our French race, as
on that of the _Sybarites_, this epitaph: "This People ate and drank
well, while they browsed upon the earth?" No! You desire that History
should write thus: "This People worshipped well, served God and
humanity well,--in thought, in philosophy, in religion, in literature,
in arts, in arms, in labor, in liberty, in their Aristocracies, in
their Democracies, in their Monarchies, and their Republics! This
nation was the spiritual laborer, the conqueror of truth; the disciple
of the highest God, in all the ways of civilization,--and, to approach
nearer to him, it invented the Republic, that government of duties and
of rights, that rule of spiritualism, which finds in _ideas_ its only
sovereignty."
Seek God, then. This is your nature and your grandeur. And do not
seek Him in these Materialisms! For God is not below,--he is on high!