Christianity by the State could have given satisfaction to the public sentiment, and insured to the religion of Christ the dignity and the stability, the recovery of which was so essential to its influence. {18} Nothing is more liable to error than an attempt to appreciate, with reference to present circumstances and the actual condition of men's minds, what was possible and good sixty years ago; and I am convinced, that in spite of his zeal for the separation of Church and State, M. Edmond de Pressensé, had he lived in 1802, would have been as little satisfied as France herself with a Christian Church restored in accordance with the plan of the Abbe Grégoire, The Concordat was a mixed and imperfect measure, subject to grave objections, and the source of numberless difficulties; but, taken altogether, the measure was grand and salutary; it gave at once to the Christian movement a sanction and an impulse that no other scheme would have been capable of imparting. M. de Chateaubriand and the "Génie du Christianisme" are entitled to the same justice. I am ready, with regard to both book and author, to concede the truth of all the objections and of all the defects that the severest critic may be able or may wish to detect; their grand and salutary action will not be the less a living fact. {19} It is with books as it is with men; it is by their qualities, whatever their faults, that they command position and exercise sway, and wherever superior qualities are discernible, their efficacy remains in spite of any faults, in spite of any defects, by which they may be accompanied. Notwithstanding its imperfections in a religious and literary point of view, the "Génie du Christianisme" was in both these respects a performance at the same time remarkable and powerful: it strongly moved men's minds, it gave a fresh impulse to men's imaginations, it reanimated and placed in their proper rank the traditions and the early impressions of Christianity. No criticism, however legitimate, can ever deprive that work of the place that it at once assumed in the religious and the literary history of its time and country. {20} Neither the Concordat nor the "Génie du Christianisme" was, in 1802, the result of a spirit of blind and barren reaction. Napoleon and Chateaubriand were both, of them hardy innovators. At the side of the ancient religion which he re-established, Napoleon firmly maintained also the liberty of conscience, whether in matters of worship or philosophy. At the very instant when the Concordat was proclaimed and the "Génie du Christianisme" was published, the learned physiologist, Cabanis, also published his treatise on the relations of man's physical and moral nature, a work which characterized man as a mere machine. And in recalling France to an admiration of the beauties of Christian literature, Chateaubriand imaged them to her in forms of language so novel and so original, that many among the severe guardians of the French language treated him as an