Nevertheless, neither the domestic nor the political spirit would suffice for the task. They need the assistance of another and a higher spirit, whose influence penetrates more deeply than they can do into the human soul. It is peculiar to religion that she has a language for every individual; a language which all can understand, the high as well as the humble, the happy as well as the unhappy; and that she ascends or descends, without an effort, into every rank and region of society. And it is one of the admirable features of the constitution of the Christian church, that her ministers are not only scattered over, but form an integral part of, the whole of society; living as near to the cottage as the palace; in habitual and intimate intercourse with the highest and the lowest; equally the monitors of greatness and the consolers of misery. This tutelary power, spite of the abuses and the faults into which it has been led by its very force and extent, has for ages exercised a more vigilant and energetic control over the moral dignity and the dearest interests of man, than any other. Nobody would be so averse as I should, for the sake of religion herself, to see a revival of the abuses by which she has been disfigured or corrupted; but I confess that I do not fear this at the present day. The principles of lay supremacy and freedom of thought have definitively triumphed in modern society: they may still have some enemies to repel, and some conflicts to sustain, but their victory is certain; they have in their favour the prevailing institutions, manners, opinions, and passions; and that general and overwhelming current of ideas and events which flows on through all diversities, obstacles, and perils, in the same direction, at Rome, Madrid, Turin, Berlin, and Vienna, no less than at London or Paris. For modern society to fear religion, or to dispute her influence with acrimony, would therefore be a puerile alarm and a fatal error. You are surrounded by an immense and excited multitude; you complain that you want means to act upon it, to enlighten, direct, control, and tranquillize it; that you have little intercourse with these men, save through the tax-gatherer and the policeman; that they are given over, without defence, to the inflammatory declamations of charlatans and demagogues, and to the blind violence of their own passions. Dispersed among them, you have men whose express mission and constant occupation it is to guide their faith, to console their distresses, to show them their duties, to awaken and elevate their hopes, to exercise over them that moral influence which you vainly seek elsewhere. And would you not second these men in their work, when they can second you so powerfully in yours, precisely in those obscure enclosures where you so rarely penetrate, and where the enemies of social order enter continually, and sap all their foundations?