In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism, Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and destiny. That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in review? because it fills up the void that those systems either create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]

[Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity. Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]

Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science. Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices, that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith. I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously. "Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the present series concludes.

But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a summary:—

1. The authority of the sacred books.
2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.
3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.

4. The Church of Christ persistent also from age to age.
5. Romanism and Protestantism.
6. The different Antichristian crises, their character and their issue.

It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many quicksands.

But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding their instant solution? What good result can I expect from studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I scrutinize generations—the honour and the destiny of which I have so much at heart, for my children form part of them—the more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated. I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations, France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.

Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than the era of modern history—in the sixteenth century the question of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the different objects which each social movement had specially in view. The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite complications of a labyrinth.

And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent, contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.

First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly these questions were all reducible to one—the aggrandizement or the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the balance of power in Europe. War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the question of nationalities, the question of little states and of great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their midst,—all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial organizations and the external relations of States.

Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria. Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased to play a great part in the events which are passing before us, and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his successors.

I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable, maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations, and which, up to the present time, have presided over the relations of States. The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect for ancient treaties,—all these elements of European order have not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-ComtÉ, the principal of National Unity requires their incorporation with France? Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories all foreign domination. But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and the rÉgime of a confederation of States might have been established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the preservation of peace between the different States.

What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up, the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected, and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute themselves into new and independent States? What would become of the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle. The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to strive to lay the foundation of a new country. We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen some of the States which form the nation of the United States of America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to change its government at discretion. The States which remained faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am one of those who think that they had both right and reason on their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to me all that he had written and said upon the subject. I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the great American State which was their country. Motive detestable for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects, has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of States.

So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the future has in store for those which involve domestic order and the organization of government. I meet here with the same confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments in opinions.

The proposition is now universally received that society has the right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself. The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the great representatives of public power. But neither the constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the essay have greater success? Events will decide. In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense, have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found any free government.

I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the state of our political institutions to that of the relations existent between the different parts of society. I say the different parts to avoid saying different classes, for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges and exclusions, of that entire rÉgime with its narrow compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental qualification they might possess. In effect, this rÉgime has fallen—fallen completely and definitively; all legal barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free: by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle. This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils that the bourgeoisie had to endure, and the risks which it had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been already often produced on the stage of the world,—theories which have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it. Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination, sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to give.

I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the distribution of the material means of existence, are in discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people, although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume the form of Socialism. I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find their field in facts affecting the sphere of material subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess, that errors such as those which presented themselves under the names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in order to surmount this danger.

Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester, who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?" After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I congratulated him this time still more.

In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous and full of hazard. The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation, when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it before them. Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the spectacle of the world which surrounds them,—a world now at length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise, the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight, unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant regions of society!

These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism, of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct, open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and, in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which are only simply political and social; many they are who would be inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt and exposed to peril.

I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating the human mind and human societies: questions of public right, questions of political organization, questions of social institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every kind—doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied, immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to feel their way through a labyrinth.

Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign power called by some Providence, by others Fate?

I am far from thinking so.

Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few," said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need, to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action, single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon attract to themselves as associates many others who would never, without such impulse, begin to move in the same path. We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if we adopt it.

I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its removal. But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril, a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a good current which is impelling us forwards;—at the same time that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of political economy have defenders no less zealous than the presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical applications. Following respectively their different objects, there are on both sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several causes. Like the ardent huntsman of BÜrgers ballad, France is solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent, contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our history is made up of this great struggle and of its vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of our country.

They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of their situation than with the rights of thought, but always remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.

We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it, and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.

What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?

Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our understanding.

I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and material. The right of France to these liberties, and their opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in their clearest light, and established in all their force on their highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2] It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch, the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion, that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the two great remedies against this ill.

[Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, Sur les libertÉs nÉcessaires et sur la libertÉ de la presse, in the sÉances of the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January, 7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]

When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas, does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too, provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the understandings: the different facts, and problems which these facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise conceptions of them.

Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle opinions still more.

Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted, and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,—when, instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be virtually solved,—when men are charged as real actors to transform into facts their own opinions or those of the spectators who are looking on,—then it is that the human mind, making its own strength the object of its reflection and examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good sense, by justice, and by possibility,—then it is that it learns to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts. Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by liberty alone.

Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving questions the most different—I might say the most contrary—in their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary histories of England, of the United States of America, and of France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as precedents.

From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M. Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With what forces and with what arms did England support these two formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political liberty. It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties, —it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,—it was by setting in action all the springs of a free and representative government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years, during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals, sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations, sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps, improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of the country, all the strength of its government. Political Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance, at another of that of progress.

The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder trial. Their government has had to struggle against the insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the national existence of the State against the attempts which were made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices, and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the right of insurrection. It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once over, the civil rÉgime of American society resumed its action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical usurpation or military tyranny.

Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848 France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty. Neither of the rÉgimes in operation immediately previous to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which owed their existence to the previous rÉgime, a regular government was promptly established, and a new constitutional monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen. On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church, which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being closed for many months. In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments which were then in force without leaving their traces; their traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction which put an end to it.

That this influence may still surmount the great trials through which governments and people may have both to pass, two things are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty, should accept its inconveniences and its perils. A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of every human situation.

Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room to nations for—what do I say? they demand from them—great activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer anything but a picture-frame without the picture—a drama written, not represented—in which the actors fail to assume their parts or to co-operate to produce the dÉnouement.

It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public in the life of free government which gives so capital an importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious. When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and religious—beliefs which recognize and attest that man is naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free rÉgime a large share both of its responsibility and of its active duties: it is only when so animated that they give consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of the material forces which assail them. Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in such manifestation their natural and logical consequences. To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice, moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe, is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the people.

I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious, it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I am now publishing.

I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order, stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and Disbelievers. No one of these groups really represents a dominant party in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious, vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions, wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here described it. Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most different directions. Upon this population it is that we must act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must accommodate ourselves to the general character of this population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should give in return its soul. It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under their blows.

Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so extraordinary an influence? First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country, the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal; still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their glory, because it believed in their sympathy.

Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same cause and to the same work. At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations, two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I have the honour to know, men very different in position and in ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his; both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts, the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent in the present state of French society; both having the resolution and the ability required in order to present Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his diocese, (Lent, 1868,) A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of Christianity. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical Conference assembled at NÉrac, A Report as to the Actual Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches. [Footnote 4]

[Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length in the Gazette de France, on the 25th and 26th of February, 1868.]
[Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]

I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch is Christian.

"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was contemporary with primitive man—a fact present in all ages, ever paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate, constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses more or less unanimous.

"Heathen nations—their history proves it—have preserved something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions which they received from their grandsire, and which are the common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the depths of the conscience of the people. Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.

"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits, breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.

"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations—this fact, what is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that it is purely natural—the spontaneous production of our habits, the simple result of our instincts—and, so to say, an irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common sense which tells us this.

"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact, as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with a force which renews itself every day. It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to its effects a supernatural character. … Supernatural means were necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic, infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His envoys by extraordinary facts—facts of a superhuman power, miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others, intervening with supernatural Éclat to enable the mission to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their religious and predestined course.

"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour, and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking, the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished; finally, the survival and the development of His work through centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the direct intervention of God—sole possible means of finding a satisfactory explanation of such grand results."

The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited—a development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity in particular; considered as a grand fact—a fact universal and permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer, by the same title, if not in the same degree; a fact at once human and divine—human by its accordance with man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect, on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?

The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there, he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly and without compromise.

"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the preacher encounters more or less in our congregations. Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time, they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the objections which we attribute to them.

"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others—it is that of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought, whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.

"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts, Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality, and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. … Let nothing henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'

"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in France, Germany, and Italy.

"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former never will go so far as these. But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural, stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working, without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of destruction.

"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed, with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold, how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of general interest? The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?

"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace; it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society. Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character, men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their rights as individuals, and of self-government, and consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious points d'appui for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations. Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel leads to Liberty.

"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from him the cry of the prophet—'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am a child!'

"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly, much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation. Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and more scientific than all that in these days men seek to substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of Religion itself.

"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas. Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian Conscience.

"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize all his arms.

"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our special mission in the special position in which God has placed us?"

Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of NÉrac, M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.

"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving. Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a point d'appui for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us strive, we also, to find these points d'appui, those keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by science. The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained in the principles of the Gospel."

I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian, but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other, to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both. The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion, or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.

I think that they are right both in their hope and their endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect, France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests, to which such subjects are all very strange. The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is, at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the world, but nothing attaches me to it. Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:—

Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.
Guizot.
Paris, April, 1868.