IVON DISCOVERING THE WORLD
The world contains not one single object that might not be a source of happiness. Sorrow springs from this, that man outdoes himself in misusing everything. He turns against his own body or his own spirit all sorts of things that seem well made for his joy.
Every being contains an unbelievable store of happiness, and this one virtue reveals the angle from which he ought to be judged.
Your true business man makes a practice of weighing everything in terms of gold: a human being, a field of wheat, a beam, a precious stone. His tables of value are false, but the principle of valuation remains none the less efficacious, fundamental. The mistake of these persons is in testing everything by a single measure, in reducing everything to this gold which enables them to seek their chosen pleasure. If it is drink, or woman, they transmute an orchard into wine or into women, losing terribly by the exchange.They thus produce a sort of analogy to what the physicists call the degradation of energy: little by little, the traffickers degrade their pleasures until they obtain those they prefer. But happiness is higher than this: it cannot be degraded, bought, transmuted. It is a pure relationship between the soul and the world. It will never be the mere object of a transaction. Many are the men who have fastened their hope, their future upon the acquisition of some material good only to experience after years of effort and privation a burning disillusion. That is because happiness is too proud and free a thing to obey the commands of merchants. It follows laws of its own that seem like inspirations, it does not come at the bidding of business men. The castle we have coveted so long may open at the appointed hour; joy will not take up its abode there unless we have deserved it.
It must be repeated again: the principle of evaluation is at the base of our moral life. But each thing should be valued in itself and for itself.
A tuft of violets is worth a great deal for its perfume and its beauty, it can bring joy or consolation to a great many hearts. But it has only the slightest commercial value; estimated in terms of building lumber or freestone it signifies nothing, or virtually nothing.
That so many men should cut and sell wood, shapeand barter the stone of which our houses are built, go gathering violets through the May thickets to sell them to townsfolk, is undoubtedly right and necessary. The real question is quite a different one: we must first possess for their own sakes all the blessings that are offered us, and not obstinately transform them, without an important reason, beyond our strict needs, at the risk of forever losing our understanding and our true possession of them.
It is almost a truism that men who are obliged by their profession to handle, store or sell substances famous for their power of giving pleasure, perfumes, fruits, silks, end by losing all appreciation of them and even by contracting a disgust and contempt for them. Cooks have no appetite. Let us not be cooks, then, in the presence of this vast world; let us know how to preserve or restore to each object its original savor and significance.
I say “restore” intentionally, for the world seems to be more and more turning from its true sense, that is to say, its human sense, the only one for us.
A stone is a beautiful thing, beautiful from all points of view; its grain, its color, its brilliancy, its hardness are all so many virtues that exercise and satisfy our senses, excite our reflections. We have a thousand noble uses, speculative or practical, to which we can put such an object. We shall be the kings of the universe if we assert boldly that wefind in these uses and in our joy the very destiny of the stone.
I remember seeing hills that had been disemboweled by a bombardment and were sown with long splinters of twisted iron; the base of a monstrous shell appeared before me, one day, under these conditions, and it seemed to me truly inhuman, this product of the work of men: the noble metal, with which so many good and beautiful things can be made, took on a hateful appearance. Man had achieved the mournful miracle of denaturing nature, rendering it ignoble and criminal.
Truly, we are equally guilty every time we turn an object aside from its mission, which is altogether one of happiness. We are guilty again every time we fail to extract, for others and for ourselves, all the happiness an object holds in store and only asks to be allowed to yield.
It is because every fragment of the earth is a source of happiness that men ceaselessly dream of winning that source for their own profit.
They do not wish to have all humanity refresh itself, plunge its feverish face and lips in the cool waters.
Once the springs were the delight and the wealth of whole peoples; they were conducted magnificentlyalong majestically proportioned aqueducts; their liquid opulence, crossing valleys and mountains, entered the cities with a great outburst of architectural joy; it shone and sparkled in the sunlight from a thousand embellished apertures before it went to bathe and nourish the people.
The statues of the gods watched over this treasure.
Today, the most beautiful springs are guarded by railings; one goes to a wicket and pays in order to drink there.
In the same way, all the springs of joy seem to have been sequestered for the profit of a few people.
This is not always for the sake of gain. In most cases it is simply for exclusiveness. The man who owns something capable of giving joy naïvely imagines that he will be happier if he is the only one to drink from this inexhaustible breast. He becomes infatuated with it and thinks of nothing but how to shut up his treasure. He puts up a wall and provides it with fragments of sharp glass, so that the wall may show its teeth, so that it may be not only defensive but, in some sense, offensive. At times, yawning with ennui in the very midst of his material prosperity, he makes an opening in the wall, only to correct this imprudence with a ditch; and from behind this he seems to say, “Now see how rich I am; look and proclaim it in a loud voice, youwho pass by, for I am beginning not to be so sure of it myself.”
To shut up a picture, a beautiful tree, a sumptuous tapestry for one’s own exclusive benefit is, after all, only a trifling folly; but there are some who undertake to capture a river, a mountain, a horizon, the sea.
A few years ago, I visited the shore of the Mediterranean, between Cannes and Menton. I was struck by a strange thing: the road that follows the edge of the sea, at the foot of the hills, through a thousand natural beauties, continually loses sight of the waves; it seems as if pushed back, held aside.
People have appropriated the horizon; they have driven their fortune like a wedge between the divine sea and the road of the common folk. They wish to be the only ones to possess the ocean, dawn, the gold and sapphire of moon, the tempests and the thunders of the open sea.
Do not be alarmed, mistaken brothers, do not tremble; we shall not throw down your walls. Live in peace in your sumptuous prison, our portion remains so beautiful and so great that we shall never exhaust it.
Close your gates, you will not shut in the perfume of your shrubbery, nor all the wind, nor all the sky. You will not imprison the fragrant odor of your flower-beds. We shall breathe them, as we pass, lovingly,and continue on our way. We shall go on still further, for we have many things to acquaint ourselves with, we divine so many, many of them that a whole life is short in the light of such a destiny. But if it pleases you to join our vagabond company you will discover, perhaps, the other side of your own walls, which are hung with flax-weed and wild geranium. The road that skirts them outside leads to joy also.
And besides, one does not find these ingenuous walls everywhere. The greed of men has not yet subjected all the beauty of things. You have snatched up in your fingers a fleeting draught of water: the ocean does not seem to be aware of it.
You must understand that we really possess nothing by ourselves. Veil, if you wish, the faces of your women and visit every day the gold in the depths of your vaults. Exclusiveness yields you no wealth save that which is dead and unproductive.
But he is truly rich for whom life is a perpetual discovery.
Discovery! It seems as if this word were one of a cluster of magic keys, one of those keys that make all doors open before our feet. We know that to possess is to understand, to comprehend. That, in a supreme sense, is what discovery means.
To understand the world can well be compared to the peaceful, enduring wealth of the great landowner; to make discoveries is, in addition to this, to come into sudden, overflowing riches, to have one of those sudden strokes of fortune which double a man’s capital by a windfall that seems like an inspiration.
The life of a child who grows up unconstrainedly is a chain of discoveries, an enriching of each moment, a succession of dazzling surprises.
I cannot go on without thinking of the beautiful letter I received today about my little boy; it said: “Your son knows how to find extraordinary riches, inexhaustible treasures, even in the barrenest fields, and when I set him on the grass, I cannot guess the things he is going to bring out of it. He has an admirable appreciation of the different kinds of soil; if he finds sand he rolls in it, buries himself in it, grabs up handfuls and flings them delightedly over his hair. Yesterday he discovered a molehole, and you cannot imagine all the pleasure he took in it. He also knows the joys of a slope which one can descend on one’s feet, or head over heels, or by rolling, and which is also splendid for somersaults. Every rise of ground interests him, and I wish you could see him pushing his cart up them. There is a little ditch where on the edge he likes to lie with his feet at the bottom and his body pressed tight againstthe slope. He played interminably, the other day, on top of a big stone; he kept stroking it, he had truly found a new pleasure there. And as for me, I find my wealth in watching him discover all these things.”
It is thus a child of fifteen months gives man lessons in appreciation.
Unfortunately, most systems of education do their best to substitute hackneyed phrases for the sense of discovery. A series of conventions are imposed on the child; he ceases to discover and experience the objects in the world in pinning them down with dry, formal labels by the help of which he can recognize them. He reduces his moral life little by little to the dull routine of classifying pins and pegs, and in this fashion begins the journey to maturity.
Discover! You must discover in order to be rich! You must not be satisfied to accept the night good-humoredly, to go to sleep after a day empty of all discovery. There are no small victories, no negligible discoveries: if you bring back from your day’s journey the memory of the white cloud of pollen the ripe plantain lets fall, in May, at the stroke of your switch, it may be little, but your day is not lost. If you have only encountered on the road the tiny urn of jade which the moss delightedly balances at the end of its frail stem, it may seem little, but be patient! Tomorrow will perhaps bemore fruitful. If for the first time you have seen a swarm of bees go by in search of a hive, or heard the snapping pods of the broom scattering its seeds in the heat, you have nothing to complain of, and life ought to seem beautiful to you. If, on that same day, you have also enriched your collection of humanity with a beautiful or an interesting face, confess that you will go to sleep upon a treasure.
There will be days when you will be like a peaceful sovereign seated under a tree: the whole world will come to render homage to you and bring you tribute. Those will be your days of contemplation.
There will be days when you will have to take your staff and wallet and go and seek your living along the highways. On these days you must be contented with what you gain from observing, from hunting; have no fear: it will be beautiful.
It is sweet to receive; it is thrilling to take. You must, by turns, charm and compel the universe. When you have gazed long at the tawny rock, with its lichens, its velvety mosses, it is most amusing to lift it up: then you will discover its weight and the little nest of orange-bellied salamanders that live there in the cool.
You have only to lie among the hairy mints and the horse-tails to admire the religious dance of thedragon-fly going to lay its eggs in the brook, or to hear in early June the clamorous orgy of the tree-toads, drunk with love; and it is very pleasant, too, to dip one’s hands in the water, to stir the gravel at the bottom, whence bubble up a thousand tiny, agile existences, or to pick the fleshy stalk of the water-lily that lifts its tall head out of the depths.
There are people who have passed a plant a thousand times without ever thinking of picking one of its leaves and rubbing it between their fingers. Do this always and you will discover hundreds of new perfumes. Each of these perfumes may seem quite insignificant, and yet when you have breathed it once, you wish to breathe it again; you think of it often, and something has been added to you.
It is an unending game and it resembles love, this possession of a world that now yields itself, now conceals itself. It is a serious, a divine game.
Marcus Aurelius, whose philosophy cannot be called futile, does not hesitate, amid many austere counsels, to urge his friends to the contemplation of those natural spectacles that are always so rich in meaning and suggestion: “Everything that comes forth from the works of nature,” he writes, “has its grace and beauty. The face wrinkles in middle age, the very ripe olive is almost decomposed, but the fruit has, for all that, a unique beauty. The bending of the corn toward the earth, the bushy browsof the lion, the foam that drips from the mouth of the wild boar and many other things, considered by themselves, are far from being beautiful; nevertheless, since they are accessory to the works of nature, they embellish them and add a certain charm. Thus a man who has a sensitive soul, and who is capable of deep reflection, will see, in whatever exists in the world, hardly anything that is not pleasant in his eyes, since it is related, in some way, to the totality of things.”
This philosopher is right as the poets are right. As our days permit us, let us reflect and observe, let us never cease to see in each fragment of the great whole a pure source of happiness. Like children drawn into a marvelous dance, let us not relax our hold upon the hand that sustains us and directs us.
Chalifour was a locksmith. I knew him in my childhood. You would have said that he was just a simple country laborer. Why has he left the memory of a rich and powerful man? His image will always be for me that of the “master of metals.”
He worked in a mean, encumbered room, full of the pungent, acrid odor of the forge, which seemed to me a sort of annex to those other underground vaults that used to be peopled by the earth-spirits.
How I loved to see him, with his little apron ofblackened leather! He would seize a bar of iron and this iron at once became his. He had his own way of handling the object of his labor that was full of love and authority. His gnarled hands touched everything with a mixture of respect and daring; I used to admire them as if they were the somber workmen of some sovereign power.
It seemed as if some pact had been made between Chalifour and the hard metal, which gave the man complete mastery over the material. One might have thought that solemn vows had been exchanged.
I see him again with his pensive air working the panting bellows and watching the metal whose incandescence was almost transparent. I see him at the anvil: the hammer, handled forcefully, delicately, obeying like a subject demon. I see him before the drill, starting the great wheel, following the measured exigencies of a ceremonial rite. Especially I see him before the smoky window with its pale flood of light, surveying, with that fine smile under his white beard, the conquered piece of metal, the creature of his will, which he had charged with destiny.
O ancient laborer, great, simple man, how rich and enviable you were, you who aspired to just one thing: to do well what you were doing, to possess intimately the object of your toil! No one better than you has understood the ponderous, obedient iron, no onethan you has worked it with greater love and constancy.
Somewhere there exists, I believe, an unhappy man eaten up with nerves and stomach-disorder. He lives crouched up against his telephone, and sends his orders to all the stock exchanges of the world. People call him the “iron king,” for some reason that has to do with finance. I don’t believe he has ever touched or weighed a morsel of real iron. Let us smile, Chalifour! Let us smile, my master!
I should like to tell you about Bernier, too. They say he is a very poor man because his coat is all shiny from wear and his shoes have the weary, wretched look of things that have never been young, because the sweat of many summers has soaked and stained the ribbon of his hat and his baggy trousers give him the air of always kneeling.
Bernier has a poor little drooping moustache with nothing glorious about it. You know only too well that he earns a hundred and twenty francs a month in some government bureau and that people say of him, “He’s a poor devil with a miserable job.”
As for me, I know that Bernier is rich, and I have seen him smile in the hour of his wealth,—for the true wealth has its times of slumber and its awakenings. Bernier possesses something which is quitestrange and almost inexpressible; it is a space, a white space, vast and virgin, and it is his power to be able to trace there certain harmonious lines which he alone knows how to trace in the right way.
Why have you never seen, why have you never been able to see Bernier at the moment when he begins his work, when the whole sickly light of the office seems concentrated on the beautiful white page? His face is serene, smiling, assured. He half closes his eyes and draws back his head; he holds, adroitly and elegantly, a certain chosen pen, flexible, with a good point, a pen that belongs to him alone, which he has prepared for himself and which he would throw away if some blundering fool happened to touch it. And then he begins!
His kingdom is ranged all about him: ink pure from all dust, a brightly lined ruler, a collection of pens with all sorts of points. He begins, and the black line obeys him, springs up, curves in, stops, bounds forward or falls back, prances, yields. Look at Bernier’s face: is it really the face of that poor wretch you have just described to me? No! No! It is the face of a masterful man, calm, sure of himself and his wealth, who is doing something that no one can do as well as he: across a snowy, limitless desert he directs, as if in a dream, a black line that advances, advances, now slowly, now dizzily, like time itself.
You are willing to pay ten francs to see an acrobat or a trained dog. Perhaps you have never watched a spider about to prepare its web. In that case, do not miss the spectacle at the very next opportunity. When you have had a good glimpse of the extraordinary creature revolving about the center of the work and fastening, with its hind leg, so quickly and accurately, the thread that it unwinds in just the right quantity, you will be so delighted that you will want to show the marvel to all those you love.
It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered them freely. And yet this does not argue a shallowness in our natures: there is a certain beauty in our prizing an object just because it has cost us some trouble. You must not imagine, however, that the marvels of nature come for nothing: they cost patience, time and attention.
An unhealthy curiosity and the taste for anomalies incline us to take pleasure in seeing a creature perform an action for which its own organism seems unsuited. It palls very quickly. For a long time now, for example, the flight of aviators has ceased to excite our interest: we know all about that unmysterious machine; its very sound and its presence in the sky defile the silence and the space whose virginity was a refuge for us. On the other hand, Iassure you I never cease to be fascinated by the mysterious manœuvers of a swarm of gnats, their interweaving curves, the spherical movement which, from instant to instant, transports the whole group of insects and seems the result of some secret password, and so many other subtle and profound mysteries that remain, for the imagination, full of allurement, full, one might say, of resources.
And do you think there is nothing disturbing in the beauty of the imperious flight of the great dragon-fly, in its sudden, meditative pauses, in its peremptory starts that lash the air like a supple, furious whip?
To whatever school of philosophy they belong, the great observers of natural phenomena, the Darwins, Lamarcks, Fabres, give us a magnificent lesson in love. But why do we nourish ourselves only on their harvests instead of providing our own? Why do we buy and read their books without drawing any real profit from them, without ever taking the trouble to look down at our own feet, without ever going to live, with the creatures of the sand and the grass, their minute, thrilling existence, in which everything would be for us full of novelty, discovery, suggestion?
The world is so generous and I feel my heart so full, so overflowing, that I do not even dream ofarranging in order all these things I have to say to you. I should wish first of all to see your brow relax, to hear you say that you are less dispirited and that you refuse to be bored.
I should like to know all of you, and each in particular, to take you by the arm and walk with you through one of the streets of your town, or along the highroad if you live in the country. You would tell me of your cares and we should search together and see if there is indeed nothing in the universe for which you are especially destined, if there does not indeed exist, all ready for your wound, the precise balm that is necessary to anoint and heal it.
I came out this morning from my shelter of planks. The barren, chalky soil that surrounds it is surely the most sterile in all Champagne, but it had rained and the storm had brought up out of this miserable soil, which is almost without vegetation, all sorts of kindly odors. They were worth more than all the perfumes of Florida, for they were the humble gift of poverty.
At the end of next February I could show you, some morning, if the sun were out, the color of the birches against the blue of the winter sky. All the slender branches will seem ablaze with purple fire, and the sky, through this delicate flame, will survey you with an exquisite tenderness. You must wait,you must drink it in deeply, and not go on your way before you have understood it. From it you will be able to store up enough happiness to last you till another winter comes and gives birth once more to this prodigy of light.
Last year, during the hard summer months on the Aisne, I used to escape each day, for a second, toward the end of the afternoon, from the overheated tent where we carried on the bloody work of the ambulance. One of my comrades was in the habit of eating an apple at this hour. I used to ask him to be good enough to lend it to me for a moment. I loved to breathe its delicate, penetrating perfume which, every day, changed with the fruit. That was indeed a rare, a beautiful moment amid the fatigues of that concert of suffering and death.
I requisitioned this imponderable part of another’s wealth; then I returned the apple to my comrade. I could have wished that you had all been with me to taste that poignant little joy.
When peace comes again, if you wish to see me in May, I will take you out under the great sycamore that is turning green at the bottom of the meadow. And there as you listen to the flying, the humming, the loving and the living of the millions of creatures that people its cool foliage, we shall set out together on a journey so rare that you will leave your heaviest sorrows along the way.
Some years ago, a magazine undertook to ask a number of writers in what chosen spot they would like to pass a few beautiful hours. Emile Verhaeren answered:
“In a certain corner of the harbor of Hamburg.”
Verhaeren is among those who have revealed to us the mournful grandeur of city views, of factory towns, those places that seem accursed and from which one might think that happiness was forever exiled.
The aspirations of our souls are so plentiful, so tenacious, so fertile that we find something to console us, satisfy us, exalt us in those very spots where suffering rules tyrannically, where the valley of Gehenna is most precipitous.
I visited the docks of Liverpool with a sort of horror. There were tall brick buildings, their roofs lost in the smoke, windows covered with grime, their interiors nothing but monstrous heaps of cotton bales. Men were climbing about there like flies. Everything smelt of fog and mould. Narrow pavements, slimy with rain, ran along by the dry-docks where the steamers, like immense corpses, were being assailed by the frantic crowd. The workers toiled amid a bombardment of hammers, a whirl of sparks.The drills snarled like whipped cats. A hideous light, smothered by the smoke and the mist of the Mersey, drowned everything in its fetid flood.
And yet, since then, I have often dreamed of that terrible spot and felt the need of living there.
For two years I attended the wounded of the First Army Corps, all of them men from the north, stained by the coal on face and chest, men from the factories or the mines. I walked with them through the smiling landscapes of the Aisne, the Vesle, the Marne, when those lovely valleys had not yet been too much disfigured by the war. Certainly they all enjoyed the slopes with their gracious groves of trees, the beautiful cultivated fields, draped like many-colored shawls over the shoulders of the little hills, but they all thought most, with love and regret, of cylinders, mine shafts, machines, and a smoky horizon.
I can understand it: one’s native soil, one’s own habitude, the familiar human landscape, moulded upon the other and transfiguring it. Above everything we have to recognize that the soul is sensitive to many infinitely varied and often contradictory things. Grace of lines, rustic charm are qualities that attach us to a country; fierce and desolate grandeur is another such, and this indeed has almost the strongest nostalgic power of all.
When beauty seems to have abandoned the world, we must realize that it has first deserted our own hearts.
Between your five senses, open like the dazzling portholes on the side of a ship, do you really believe there is nothing, nothing but the void, the night, the dumb wall?
I do not know, I do not know.... I cannot believe....
The sound rises, rises like the skylark, and the ear rises with it. And then comes a moment when the sound still rises and the hearing stops, like those birds that do not frequent the loftiest altitudes.
Tell me, are they lost truly and forever, those sounds that hold sway at the gates of your soul, those sounds to which your senses are not equal?
Wait! Hope! Some day perhaps we shall know.
You will say to me: “The light is so beautiful, so beautiful! It adds luster to so many things that are dear to me. Have I any need to dream of other rays than these? My eyes have already so much to do that they are overcome by their delight. The beauty of sound and silence ceaselessly intoxicates my ear.”
True! Your soul has active purveyors. They do not leave it idle. They come and heap at itsfeet riches that demand its enthusiasm and its solicitude.
But often there is in your soul something your senses have not brought there, an exquisite joy, an inexpressible sadness. Do not forget that you live bathed in a multitude of rays to only some of which you are sensible. The others are perhaps not quite strange to you. What is passing, in contraband, across the frontiers of your being? Do not obstinately try to bring it under control. Submit, experience, be merely attentive and respectful to everything. Some day we shall perhaps know more things than we are able to divine now.
One of the greatest delights of the religious faith is to abandon ourselves to gratitude, to be able to thank, from an overflowing heart, the moral being to whom we feel indebted for our wealth.
Why then, since I have long lost this faith, do I still feel each day, and several times a day, the great need of singing the canticle of Francis of Assisi, the lovely canticle in which he says:
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, and unto all Thy creatures, especially our gracious brother the sun, who gives us the day and through whom Thou showest us Thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with a great splendor. He is the symbol of Thee, Most High.Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the moon andthe stars, fashioned by Thee in the sky, clear, precious, and beautiful.Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the wind, and for the air and the clouds, for the pure sky, and for all the time during which Thou givest to thy creatures life and sustenance.Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the water, who is so useful, precious and clean.Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our brother the fire, through whom Thou illuminest the night. He is lovely and gay, courageous and strong.Praise unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the earth, who sustains us and nourishes us, and brings forth divers fruits and flowers of a thousand colors and the grass.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, and unto all Thy creatures, especially our gracious brother the sun, who gives us the day and through whom Thou showest us Thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with a great splendor. He is the symbol of Thee, Most High.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the moon andthe stars, fashioned by Thee in the sky, clear, precious, and beautiful.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the wind, and for the air and the clouds, for the pure sky, and for all the time during which Thou givest to thy creatures life and sustenance.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the water, who is so useful, precious and clean.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our brother the fire, through whom Thou illuminest the night. He is lovely and gay, courageous and strong.
Praise unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the earth, who sustains us and nourishes us, and brings forth divers fruits and flowers of a thousand colors and the grass.
A poet has transposed these divine strophes into the harmony of French verse and sings thus:
I shall praise you, Lord, for having made so lovely and so brightThis world where you wish us to await our life.
Now, I know very well that in this world I am not awaiting life, I am living. I know very well that it is here I must live and lose no time about it. My gratitude is all the more pressing, all the more intense.
What if it does rise to an empty heaven, that infinite gratitude!
It will not be lost. And is that heaven ever empty to which we breathe out so many dreams, where there trembles so much beauty!
The sweetest of human voices has said: “Lay up for yourselves in heaven the treasures that do not perish.” Perhaps we shall be pardoned if we dareto murmur: “Lay up for yourselves, in this world, the treasures that do not perish.”
They will not perish, these treasures, O my son, and all you whom I love, they will not perish if you thirst to discover them only that you may share them with others, that you may bequeath them to a devout posterity.
They will not perish if they find their being, their supreme reason, in that region of the soul where believers have raised up the tabernacle of a God.