In holding this language, M. Encontre was not merely performing, on his own account, an act of humility and of Christian charity; he was touching upon one of the supreme questions which, in our days, are occasioning a crisis in Christendom; and he was indicating its true and its sole solution. Like all passions, (the best are not exempt,) the passion for the salvation of man's soul is full of enthusiasm and fall of blindness; it believes too readily in the possibility of attaining the object; it is too unscrupulous and undiscriminating in the means. {168} Hence sprung religious tyranny and theological intolerance: the powerful thought they could compel the human soul to work out its own salvation; the learned believed they could define the conditions of that salvation. Mistakes, both of them, profoundly antichristian! Just as no power of man has the right to strip any single soul, created by God free and responsible, of its liberty of conscience; so, equally, no science of man can define the laws and the facts that shall regulate the future state of the soul. Liberty is, on this earth, the principle of the moral life of man; man's state beyond this earth is a question between him and his Maker, and to be determined by the use which man may have here made of his liberty. To respect God's gift of liberty to man, and the mystery of God's decrees respecting man's salvation, is in reality the law of Christians; and it is only on this double condition that there really is either any awakening or any progress of Christians. {169} Nothing does more honor to the memory of M. Daniel Encontre than to have been one of the first to understand and to fulfill this double duty. Firmly attached to those fundamental articles of belief which are Christianity itself, he was strange to every narrowness or exaggeration of doctrine, to every presumptuousness of opinion, and to every theological intolerance; his piety was comprehensive, without there being any vagueness in his faith; his Christianity was that of a Liberal; nor did his attainments as a mathematician indispose him to remain a Christian. Scarcely was M. Encontre dead, when two new men, both, like him, eminent as pastors and professors--M. Alexandre Vinet and M. Adolphe Monod--appeared on the religious arena, and gave more éclat to the Christian reaction by using similar means, and by impelling the Protestant Church of France in the same direction. {170}