I have grown old, I have had to undergo painful disappointments, but in spite of all, my first impulse has ever been to believe in the prompt efficacy of truth when it knocks unhesitatingly at the door of the mind; nor is it without reluctance that I bring myself to wait for time and experience to unvail what is error. {375} Of the two kinds of impiety which I have just alluded to, the impiety which is gross and cynical, which springs from immorality and which produces immorality, is undoubtedly the more fatal to the human soul, to its dignity and its future lot; but systematic impiety--impiety that establishes itself into doctrine--is the more dangerous for human societies; for, enamored of itself, it takes its pride in self-glorification and self-propagation. The ambitious ones of impiety obtain more credit than those, the chief characteristic of whose impiety is licentiousness. Recklessness in religion is in our days a more widely spread evil than impiety. I do not here speak of that indifferentism with respect to religious subjects that the Abbé de la Mennais so eloquently attacked; that sentiment may be profound, and it may be frivolous; it may spring from Materialism, from Skepticism, from a thoughtful impiety, as well as from a gross forgetfulness of the paramount questions which exercise the human mind. {376} The recklessness now so common gives no thought at all to these subjects, does not picture to itself that there is any ground for so doing; where this tendency prevails, man's thought confines itself to its terrestrial, its actual life; the business and the interests of this life alone occupy him, alone content him; there is, as it were, a sleep of all those instincts and requirements of the human soul which go beyond this low region, and if not a complete abdication, at least a sluggish torpor of the heavenly part of our nature. Let not the friends of a religious life and of the Christian faith deceive themselves; it is here that they have the greatest obstacles to encounter, the deadest weight to lift and to remove. Aggression provokes resistance; a struggle leads to the marshaling of the different hostile forces; nor does the learning of the believer dread to enter the arena with the learning of the incredulous. {377} But recklessness in religion is like a vast Dead Sea in which no being lives, an immense barren desert in which no vegetation pushes. It is, if not the most revolting, at least the most formidable evil of the day. It is against this evil that Christians are bound, more especially, to direct their energies, for there are a world and an entire population here to be conquered.