It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men, men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors, is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending. {15} The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle. Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we have ever forgotten. {16}