Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the Christian faith. {12} No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity, which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true, behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only enables him to see them. {13} When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from her that which she has not promised. Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate, the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy? {14}