PRECURSORS OF THE TEMPEST.

Permit a former dignitary of the Tauride to bless your two sons. May they, under the aegis of their respective mothers, become intelligent in all things and be for you a cause of real satisfactions! I wish that they may be convinced Spirits, that is, that they may so saturate themselves with the idea of other lives, with the principles of fraternity, of charity, and of solidarity, that the events which will rush forth when they are at an age of conscience and reason may not frighten them, nor weaken their confidence in divine justice, in the midst of the trials through which Humanity has to pass. At times, the bitterness with which your adversaries attack you surprises you. According to them, you are deluded madmen, you take fiction for reality, you resurrect the devil and all the errors of the Middle Ages.

You know that to answer all the attacks would be to engage in a polemic without result. Your silence proves your strength, and, if you do not give them occasion to retort, they will end by falling silent.

The unforeseen is what you can most fear. If there were to occur a change of government, in the direction of the most intolerant ultramontanism, you would certainly be persecuted, mocked, condemned, expatriated. But events, stronger than the machinations carried out in muffled tones, are preparing on the political horizon a storm violent enough, and, when the tempest breaks, see to it that you are well sheltered, that you are very strong and very disinterested. There will be ruins, invasions, delimitations of frontiers, and, from that immense shipwreck, which will come from Europe, from Asia, from America, only, know this, the tempered souls will escape, the enlightened Spirits, all that is justice, loyalty, honor, solidarity. Are your societies perfect, such as they are organized? You have your pariahs by the millions; misery incessantly fills your prisons, your brothels, and supplies the scaffolds. Germany witnesses, as in all times, the emigration of its inhabitants by the hundreds of thousands, which does no honor to its governments; the Pope, a temporal prince, spreads error throughout the world, instead of the Spirit of Truth, of which he has constituted himself the artificial emblem. Everywhere envy. I see interests that combat one another and no effort for the raising up of the ignorant. The governments, undermined by selfish principles, think of fortifying themselves against the rising tide, a tide which is the human conscience, which at last rises up, after centuries of expectation, against the minority that exploits the living forces of the nationalities. Nationalities! May Russia not encounter a terrible reef, a Cape of Storms, in that word. Beloved country, let your statesmen not forget that the greatness of a nation does not consist in having indefinite frontiers, many provinces and few villages, a few great cities in an ocean of ignorance, immense plains, deserted, sterile, inclement as envy, as all that is false and emits false sounds. It matters little that the sun does not set upon your conquests, there will be no fewer disinherited ones for that, no less gnashing of teeth, a whole threatening hell with jaws gaping wide as immensity. Nations, like governments, have free will; like simple individualities, they know how to guide themselves by love, by union, by concord. Yet they will furnish to the announced tempest electrical elements suited to destroy and disaggregate them the better.

Innocent.

In life, archbishop of the Tauride.