I feel no difficulty in thus ranging side by side things which are coexisting, and developing themselves simultaneously although contrary in their nature. There are epochs when a great current rises and hurries society toward a single object and by a single way. {372} Others there are where different currents cross and combat one another, and impel society at the same moment toward different objects. The spirit of authority and of faith was very predominant in the seventeenth century; the spirit of independence and of innovation in the eighteenth. The nineteenth century is sweeping on its way under the empire of tendencies various but simultaneous in their power and their activity; the different principles and elements of our society, good or the reverse, confront one another, awaiting the moment when they may again be harmonized. I retraced the awakening of Christianity and its progress; I seek in no respect to qualify any remark that I have made, either as to that important movement or as to the confidence with which it inspires me; but I, at the same time, believe also in the forcible influence of the antichristian demonstrations which are taking the form of impiety or of recklessness; nor can I disregard the force of that religious perplexity into which this great struggle throws so many men of feeble purpose, and even some men of eminent powers of mind. {373} In our days impiety is spreading, and assuming serious development, more especially among the operative classes, and in that young generation that issues from the middle classes, and is destined to follow the liberal professions. Not that the infection is universal even there; on the contrary, those classes show also the most different tendencies; among them, too, the progress of the Christian awakening has made itself felt, and religious belief is treated with more respect. There, however, it is that the evil of impiety has its focus and its center of expansion. Sometimes it manifests itself under gross and cynical forms, sometimes with a pretension to thought and learning; now by the brutal licentiousness of its behavior, now by the arrogant yet embarrassed expression of its opinions. {374} Last year I received an invitation to attend the great congress of students assembled at Liège; an invitation which, although I expressed for the purpose of this assemblage a real and a sincere interest, I declined. When I learned what the ideas were that had been there loudly expressed--when I read that the question had there been put as one between God and man, and that the idolatry of man had been proclaimed in the place of the adoration of God,--I experienced two sentiments the most contradictory, a lively satisfaction that I had held myself aloof from such a scene, and a profound regret, at the same time, that I had not been present to protest against such an invasion of Pantheism and of Atheism into young souls, upon whom my thoughts only rest with sentiments of affectionate hopefulness.