them those which hoisted most manfully the colors of orthodoxy? And if some are in a languishing condition, is it not because they offered in this respect fewest guarantees? Evidently the first condition of existence for our religious institutions of charity is sound doctrine. {193} My readers, permit me to question you still more closely. Throw your eyes upon the eight or ten families best known to you, beginning with your own, and compare what they are now with what they were in 1819; contrast their occupations, tastes, sacrifices, and intercourse, the modes of education, the books read, friendships formed, and so on; and then declare, thankless ones, if God has allowed you to be without encouragement." [Footnote 29] [Footnote 29: Pourquoi je demeure dans l'Église établie, par M. Adolphe Monod, pp. 25-32. Paris, 1849.] M. Adolphe Monod had good reason to draw attention to this general progress of Christianity; but there was another progress also deserving notice, that which he had himself made, and which he was making more and more every day, in the attainment of the true and distinguishing character of a Christian. {194} At the commencement of his career as a minister of the Gospel, in his different controversies, and especially in his controversy with the Consistory of Lyons, he had shown rudeness, impatience, and want of foresight; he had been too precipitate in enforcing his faith by arguments, and too much disposed to undervalue the obstacles in its way. Thanks to his genuine sincerity and the natural elevation of his character, time, experience, and success had given at once breadth and suppleness to his thought. Faith had generated modesty, and hope patience. Contrary to the ordinary bias of men, his liberalism had increased in the same measure as his strength. As an act of duty he made in 1848 an avowal of the state of his mind in this respect. "The age," he said, "reproaches us with '_exclusisme_,' (exclusiveness,) a new word expressly invented to denote its favorite charge; for false ideas the age has only the resource of a barbarous phraseology. This '_exclusisme_' is the sole thing which the age cannot tolerate in matters of doctrine: it is prepared, it says to itself, to take everything within its pale except the 'exclusives.' {195} Thus they demand from us only one change in the profession of our faith; they call upon us to substitute for our usual prefatory formula, 'This is the truth,' the words, 'This is my opinion.' And if they, in claiming such qualification of language, limited their demand to things which, in spite of any relative importance, do not constitute the substance of the faith and of the life of a Christian, we should do what they require; perhaps I should rather say, we do it already, as brother should do to brother, and in the interest of truth itself. It is one of the distinctive features of the awakening of Christians in our epoch, that charitably sparing in the absolute dogmatism of which the