Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse? {lxvii} 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. {lxviii} 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. {lxix}