To despair is to desert.
Let us look to the future.
The future,--no one knows what tempests still separate us from port, but the port, the distant and radiant port, is in sight; the future, we repeat, is the republic for all men; let us add, the future is peace with all men.
Let us not fall into the vulgar error, which is to curse and to dishonour the age in which we live.

Erasmus called the sixteenth century "the excrement of the ages," _fex temporum_.

Bossuet thus qualified the seventeenth century: "A wicked and paltry age." Rousseau branded the eighteenth century, in these terms: "This great rottenness amidst which we live." Posterity has proved these illustrious men in the wrong.

It has said to Erasmus: "The sixteenth century was great;" it has said to Bossuet: "The seventeenth century was great;" it has said to Rousseau: "The eighteenth century was great." Even had the infamy of those ages been actual, those great men would have been wrong to complain.

The man who thinks should accept simply and calmly the surroundings in which Providence has placed him.