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. {lviii} 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.] {lix} 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.