I am happy to see you so determinedly courageous. We have need of
courage, or, rather, we have need of something difficult to obtain,
which is neither patience nor overconfidence, but a certain belief in
the order of things, the power to be able to say of every trial that it
is well.

Our instinct for life makes us try to free ourselves from our
obligations when they are too cruel, too oft-repeated, but, as I am
happy to know, you have been able to see what Spinoza understood by
human liberty. Inaccessible ideal, to which one must cling
nevertheless. . . .

. . . Dear mother, these trials that we must accept are long, but
notwithstanding their unchanging form one cannot call them monotonous,
since they call upon courage which must be perpetually new. Let us unite
together for God to grant us strength and resource in accepting
everything. . . .

You know what I call religion: that which unites in man all his ideas of
the universal and the eternal, those two forms of God. Religion, in the
ordinary sense of the word, is but the binding together of certain moral
and disciplinary formulas with the fine poetic imagery of the great
biblical and Christian philosophies.

Do not let us offend any one. Looked at properly, religious formulas,
however apart they may remain from my own habit of mind, seem to me
praiseworthy and sympathetic in all that they contain of aspiration and
beauty and form.

Dear mother whom I love, let us always hope: trials are legion, but