awakened within us by thought that ennoble and brighten our life.  Thought is our aim, perhaps; but it may be with this as with many a journey we take—­the place we are bound for may interest us less than the journey itself, the people we meet on the road, the unforeseen that may happen.  Here, as everywhere, it is only the sincerity of human feeling that abides.  As for a thought, we know not, it may be deceptive; but the love, wherewith we have loved it, will surely return to our soul; nor can a single drop of its clearness or strength be abstracted by error.  Of that perfect ideal that each of us strives to build up in himself, the sum total of all our thoughts will help only to model the outline; but the elements that go to construct it, and keep it alive, are the purified passion, unselfishness, loyalty, wherein these thoughts have had being.  The extent of our love for the thing which we hold to be true is of greater importance than even the truth itself.  Does not love bring more goodness to us than thought can ever convey?  Loyally to love a great error may well be more helpful than meanly to serve a great truth; for in doubt, no less than in faith, are passion and love to be found.  Some doubts are as generous and passionate as the very noblest convictions.  Be a thought of the loftiest, surest, or of the most profoundly uncertain, the best that it has to offer is still the chance that it gives us of loving some one thing wholly, without reserve.  Whether it be to man, or a God; to country, to world or to error, that I truly do yield myself up, the precious ore that shall some day be found buried deep in the ashes of love will have sprung from the love itself, and not from the thing that I loved.  The sincerity of an attachment, its simplicity, firmness, and zeal—­ these leave a track behind them that time can never efface.  All passes away and changes; it may be that all is lost, save only the glow of this ardour, fertility, and strength of our heart.

96.  “Never did man possess his soul in such peace as he,” says Saint-Simon of one of them, who was surrounded on all sides by malice, and scheming, and snares.  And further on he speaks of the “wise tranquillity” of another, and this “wise tranquillity” pervades every one of those whom he terms the “little flock.”  The “little flock,” truly, of fidelity to all that was noblest in thought; the “little flock” of friendship, loyalty, self-respect, and inner contentment, that pass along, radiant with peace and simplicity, in the midst of the lies and ambitions, the follies and treacheries, of Versailles.  They are not saints, in the vulgar sense of the word.  They have not fled to the depths of forest or desert, or sought egotistic shelter in narrow cells.  They are sages, who remain within life and the things that are real.  It is not their piety that saves them; it is not in God alone that their soul has found strength.  To love God, and to serve Him with all one’s might, will not