Nor will _points d'appui_ or means of action fail them in this great work. For if religious recklessness is in our days deplorably common, neither is perplexity as to religious matters a stranger among us. It springs from sentiments and out of interests very different in their natures, sometimes merely on the surface, sometimes in the depths of the soul. There is a kind of perplexity founded upon the dictates of common sense, and entitled to every respect, but to which I do not accord, nevertheless, the epithet of religious; this perplexity is generated by the instinct or the experience of the utility of religion for the maintenance of order in society, not merely in the great public society, but also in the smaller domestic societies, that is, in the state as well as in families. {378} A man of distinguished mental capacity and of an honorable character, "elève" of the "Ecole politechnique," and "ingénieur en chef" in one of our great departments, was one day speaking to me with sorrow of the attacks leveled at Christianity. "It is not," he said, "on my own account that I regret these attacks; you know I am a 'Voltairean;' but I ask for regularity and peace in my own household; I felicitate myself that my wife is a Christian, and I mean my daughters to be brought up like Christian women. These demolishers know not what they are doing; it is not merely upon our Churches, it is upon our houses, our homes and their inmates, that their blows are telling!" {379} There is a perplexity more serious and more profound--a perplexity really religious--one suggested not merely by the necessity of social order, but by that of moral security, of harmony, of confidence, and of intimate hopefulness in the presence of the problems and of the chances that weigh upon man. This perplexity takes place not merely in the minds of thinking men--of men who render to themselves an account of their internal troubles, and who avow them undisguisedly; it causes agitation and spreads desolation among multitudes of single-minded, modest, and silent men, who suffer from the antichristian _malaria_ spread around them. What framer of statistics shall count their number? what philosopher minister successfully to their disease? I go further still. I listen to contemporary philosophers themselves, and I find in the cases of some of the more eminent an intellectual perplexity, showing itself clearly through opinions the most systematic, and the furthest removed from the Christian religion. I shall name but two--M. Vacherot and M. Edmond Scherer. {380} I have no intention of entering here into a special examination of their ideas; I seek only to show the state of their minds and of their souls, as it results from the tenor of their works.