Ladies and Gentlemen,--I have accepted with great pleasure the
invitation to address you in this illustrious institution devoted to the
noblest researches of science and of true philosophy. I have dreamed
since my childhood of this island, where I have so many friends, and
which I visit so tardily.
I am a Briton of France. In our old books, England is always called the
Island of the Saints; and, in truth, all our saints of Armorican
Brittany, those saints of doubtful orthodoxy, who, if they were again
alive, would be more in harmony with us than with the Jesuits, came from
the Island of Britain. I have seen in their chapel the trough of stone
in which they crossed the sea. Of all races, the Britain race is that
which has ever taken religion the most seriously. Even when the progress
of reflection has shown us that some articles among the catalogues of
things which we have always regarded as fixed should be modified, we
never break away from the symbol under which we have from the first
approved the ideal.
For our faith is not contained in obscure metaphysical propositions: it
is in the affirmations of the heart. I have therefore chosen for my
discourse to you, not one of those subtleties which divide, but one of
those themes, dear to the soul, which bring nearer, and reconcile. I
shall speak to you of that book resplendent with the divine spirit, that
manual of submissive life which the most godly of men has left us,--the
Cæsar, Marcus Aurelius Antonine. It is the glory of sovereigns that the
most irreproachable model of virtue may be found in their ranks, and
that the most beautiful lessons of patience and of self-control may come
from a condition which one naturally believes to be subject to all the
seductions of pleasure and of vanity.