wondered at their strangeness, I on my side will propose to you another subject for your wonder. {175} These strange dogmas conquered the world. In their very infancy they invaded learned Athens, rich Corinth, haughty Rome. They gathered together 'Confessors' from workshops, from prisons, from schools, from the courts of justice, and from thrones. Conquerors of civilization, they triumphed over barbarism; they made to pass under the same yoke the degraded Roman, the savage Sicambrian. The forms of society have changed; society has been dissolved and moulded afresh. They alone have endured in their integrity. No other doctrine, whether of philosophy or of religion, lasted: each had its time; each time its idea; and, as a celebrated writer has said, the religious sentiment, abandoned to itself, chose for itself moulds in accordance with the time, which it broke when the time was no longer there. But the dogma of the Cross persisted in recurring. {176} Had it only taken possession of a certain class of persons it would have been much, it would perhaps have been even inexplicable; but you find followers of the Cross in the camp and in civil life, among the rich and among the poor, among the bold and among the timid, among the learned and among the ignorant. This dogma is good for all, everywhere, always; it never grows old. The religion of the Cross appears nowhere in arrear of civilization; on the contrary, far as civilization may progress, it ever finds Christianity in advance. Suppose not that a complaisant Christianity will ever cancel any article or expunge any idea to accommodate itself to the age: no, it derives its strength from its inflexibility, and needs not make any surrender to be in harmony with what is beautiful, legitimate, true; for it is in itself the type of them all. Still it is not a religion which flatters man; and the worldly, by keeping aloof, show plainly enough that Christianity is a strange doctrine. Those who dare not reject it strive to render it palatable. They strip it of what offends them--of its myths, as they are pleased to style them; they almost make out of Christ's doctrine a _rationalism_. {177} But, singular to say, once a rationalism it has no longer any force; in this respect resembling one of the most marvelous creatures in the animate world, to which it is death to lose its sting. The _strange_ dogmas disappear, but with them all zeal, fervor, sanctity, charity, disappear also; the salt of the earth has lost its savor, and we know not by what means to restore it. But, on the other hand, do you learn that somewhere or other there is an awakening of Christians, that Christianity is resuscitating, that faith shows signs of life, that zeal abounds? Ask not in what soil these precious plants are springing; you may pronounce yourself: it is in the rude and rugged soil of orthodoxy, in the shade of the mysteries which confound human reason, and of which human reason would like so much to get rid, ...