himself and even prospers.[5] He welcomes the unfortunate, feeds them, sets them to work, and unites them in matrimony and beggars, vagabonds, and fugitive peasants gather around the sanctuary.  Their camp gradually becomes a village and next a small town; man plows as soon as he can be sure of his crops, and becomes the father of a family as soon as he considers himself able to provide for his offspring.  In this way new centers of agriculture and industry are formed, which likewise become new centers of population.[6]

To food for the body add food for the soul, not less essential.  For, along with nourishment, it was still necessary to furnish Man with inducements to live, or, at the very least, with the resignation that makes life endurable, and also with the poetic daydreams taking the place of massing happiness.[7] Down to the middle of the thirteenth century the clergy stands almost alone in furnishing this.  Through its innumerable legends of saints, through its cathedrals and their construction, through its statues and their expression, through its services and their still transparent meaning, it rendered visible “the kingdom of God.”  It finally sets up an ideal world at the end of the present one, like a magnificent golden pavilion at the end of a miry morass.[8] The saddened heart, athirst for tenderness and serenity, takes refuge in this divine and gentle world.  Persecutors there, about to strike, are arrested by an invisible hand; wild beasts become docile; the stags of the forest come of their own accord every morning to draw the chariots of the saints; the country blooms for them like a new Paradise; they die only when it pleases them.  Meanwhile they comfort mankind; goodness, piety, forgiveness flows from their lips with ineffable sweetness; with eyes upturned to heaven, they see God, and without effort, as in a dream, they ascend into the light and seat themselves at His right hand.  How divine the legend, how inestimable in value, when, under the universal reign of brute force, to endure this life it was necessary to imagine another, and to render the second as visible to the spiritual eye as the first was to the physical eye.  The clergy thus nourished men for more than twelve centuries, and in the grandeur of its recompense we can estimate the depth of their gratitude.  Its popes, for two hundred years, were the dictators of Europe.  It organized crusades, dethroned monarchs, and distributed kingdoms.  Its bishops and abbots became here, sovereign princes, and there, veritable founders of dynasties.  It held in its grasp a third of the territory, one-half of the revenue, and two-thirds of the capital of Europe.  Let us not believe that Man counterfeits gratitude, or that he gives without a valid motive; he is too selfish and too envious for that.  Whatever may be the institution, ecclesiastic or secular, whatever may be the clergy, Buddhist or Christian, the contemporaries who observe it for forty generations are not bad judges.  They surrender to it their will and their possessions, just in proportion to its services, and the excess of their devotion may measure the immensity of its benefaction.