If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace. What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life; in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity. {172} The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ. As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very efficacious influence to the principle of authority. {173} Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul, let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What is the principle of this contest, and what its character?