Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/53

MADAME ROLAND i 235 the age of fourteen, we find this remarkable being philosophizing upon republics, and taking part in mind against the evils and injustice fostered by monarchies. Madame Roland wandered from prescribed creeds, and became a liberal in her religious ideas. She has been called an Atheist, but every line she writes, and her life of self-sacrifice, disprove this assertion. Her " one prayer," to which she says she confined herself, is, to my mind, sublime with beautiful and practical religion. " O Thou who hast placed me on the earth, enable me to fulfil my destination in the manner most conformable to the Divine will, and most beneficial to my fellow-creatures." 1 can imagine no more perfect religious faith, no more complete submission to, and acknowledgment of, a Supreme Power than this prayer contains. It strikes me as far more devout and respectful than the prayers of many people who endeavor to dictate to God and direct Him what to do and what not to do, what to bestow and what to withhold She writes of her religious agitations with great reluctance to Sophie Cannet, fearful of disturbing the serenity of her friend's convictions ; but she continued to conform to her mother's religious ideas during that good woman's life, and even afterward she kept up the forms of Catholicism for the sake of a valued family servant who was devoted to her. This delicate consideration of the feelings of others has been mistaken by some bigoted minds for deceit or vacillation on the part of Madame Roland ; as if such a being were capable of either. We owe all our knowledge of her early private life to the voluminous corre- spondence between her and Sophie Cannet ; to this friend she wrote those long, journal-like letters, in which one young girl often pours out the inmost secrets of her heart and soul to another ; but, unlike the letters of the ordinary girl, Manon's contained criticisms of the books she had read, and discussions of philo- sophical subjects, which bear evidence to her wonderful precocity of thought and feeling in her " teens." Originality, unselfishness, genius of the rarest order, are all displayed in these letters ; already had her mind grasped some great truths which it requires the average philosopher half a century to discover, when at seventeen, she says, "Man is the epitome of the universe. The revolutions of the world without are an image of those which take place in his own soul." Upon the news of the mortal illness of Louis XV., she writes to Sophie this strongly humanitarian passage : " Although the obscurity of my birth, name, and position seem to preclude me from taking any interest in the government, yet the common weal touches me in spite of it. My country is something to me, and the love I bear it is unquestionable. How could it be otherwise when noth ing in the world is indifferent to me ? A love of humanity unites me to every- thing that breathes. A Caribbean interests me ; the fate of a Kaffir goes to my heart. Alexander wished for more worlds to conquer. I could wish for more to love."