Two things strike me in this double attack--on the one hand its timidity, yet gravity; on the other, the powerful resistance which it encounters. Nothing is less novel than a denial of the supernatural character of Christianity, and of its primitive facts, of its miracles, of the divinity of its founder. The eighteenth century carried on this war in a far more violent, rude, and iniquitous spirit than the nineteenth century has done. M. Renan, in the attempt to dethrone Jesus, has at least treated him with admiration and respect; not from calculation, I feel assured, but from the natural tone of his mind. In our time, men have instincts and tastes, at once inconsequent and prudent; at the very time when they engage in a deadly struggle they affect to carry thither the cool impartiality of spectators; they flatter themselves that they unite the acumen of the critic to the feeling of the poet. The skeptic shows no disinclination to play the mystic; and the erudite man strives to cover with the vail of fancy the ruin that he makes. {112} Hume was a more stubborn skeptic, and Voltaire an enemy more daring. If I pass from philosophy to politics, and from books to events, I observe the war undergoing a similar transformation. What a contrast between the attacks of the Directory and the Emperor Napoleon the First upon the Papacy, and the circumspect and hesitating treatment of which, in spite of the blows that it receives, the Papacy is in these days the object? Are we to conclude that the general course of events has changed, and that the flood, which for a century whirled Europe along, is arrested and subsiding? Certainly not: there are abundant facts to prove the contrary. Whether regarded as a religious or a political question, whether considered as affecting opinions or interests, the contest between authority and liberty, between faith and incredulity, is carried on more earnestly and more systematically now than ever: principles on each side are pushed to their extreme consequences, and contrasted in a manner never before the case. {113} But experience imposes a restraint upon men even where it does not change them. In the years of internal order which the Empire insured, and in the years of liberty to which the constitutional Monarchy gave the sanction of its laws, the different parties learned to appreciate the obstacles with which they had to contend, and to measure their own strength and that of their opponents: they now know that everything is not possible to them; and necessity has inculcated a certain amount of equity and good sense. The experience of the past, as well as that of each day, convinces them of their inability to insure a complete success to their systems and their designs. Its adversaries thought Christianity expiring; but they soon saw that it was still full of life: while they express their surprise and persevere in their warfare, they admit its practical influence, render homage to its