grand events their course; Christ's religion and man's liberty will once more remember that each stands in need of the other, and that their alliance in the bosom of order is their natural and necessary condition. That they do misunderstand each other occasions the most serious crisis at this moment in modern society. {214} Here, too, is the gravest peril which the Christian religion has in our days to surmount. Appreciate the force of the two sentiments to which I just now referred, the love of science and the love of liberty; understand through what phases of degeneration and of deceptive transformation those sentiments may, in the ardor of pursuit and of combat, have to pass; reckon up, if reckon you can, all the false ideas, the chimerical hopes, which they may suggest; and then add to the amount, and as their consequences, the immoral and anarchical passions which may make those sentiments their pretext and their tools; and in doing this, you will find that you have passed in review the forces of that enemy now waging an implacable war against Christianity, although a war to which Christianity is called upon to put an end. {215} I do not in any respect underrate the forces of that army. I disparage no more their quality than their numbers. To maintain the combat worthily and efficaciously we should, at the onset, accord to our adversaries the whole amount of their merits as well as of their strength, and then attack them in their strongest entrenchments. I have charged the enemies of Christianity with puerile presumptuousness when they refuse to see the energy and the progress of the awakening of Christianity. It is of infinite importance to Christians, on their side, not to be blind to the ardor and the effects which that Antichristian demonstration is producing, of which their Faith and their Church are the aim. I am firmly convinced that in this war Christianity will conquer; but it will leave its enemies with arms still in their hands. It will no more gain over them any complete or definitive victory than it will be able to conclude with them any serious or durable peace. In the actual state of men's minds and of society, the struggle will go on between the followers and the opponents of Christianity; the two armies will continue to deploy their forces in the face each of the other; and that of the Christians, in order to defend and to extend its domain, will be incessantly called upon to watch and to combat the movements of its enemy. {216} While combating them it will be also obliged to comply with the terms that truth exacts, and the conditions that liberty imposes. From these exigencies and these conditions Christianity has nothing to dread--that is, if it accepts them boldly, and in its turn imposes them upon its enemies. Let man's science, labors, and systems be submitted to the same tests, and handled with the same freedom of examination, as are being applied to the