most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom. {199} Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of earthly power, the appellation, _brethren_, never ceased to be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear themselves greeted as _brethren_. The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand to the political authorities, or in which the different classes stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association, called family. {200} There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman family,--we shall not need to examine long before we discern clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and liberty.