Works, too, are on a level with the minds that inspire them. Never have they been so numerous, and never so fruitful. Foundations of all sorts, churches, monasteries, orders, missions, schools, hospitals, orphan-asylums, have multiplied in emulation of each other. A small part of the works of our day would suffice for the glory of any epoch. The clergy encourage and direct these movements; they display zeal and self-abnegation; and, devoted to their chiefs, they become more and more devoted to the church. The _élite_ of society do them honor by following in their footsteps. Disabused of the unhealthy and destructive ideas by which their fathers were lost, and instructed by a hundred years of experience and misery, the higher classes, in France especially, return with simplicity to the faith and to the Christian virtues. Obedient to the eternal law which regulates society, the lower classes by degrees model themselves according to their example. The centenary _fêtes_, the canonizations, the pilgrimages of Salette, Lourdes, and others, are living witnesses of the fervor of the clergy and the public faith. And, to crown all, the Church never attested its supernatural fecundity by such a number of saints and martyrs. The nineteenth century is the richest in canonizations. When the Church is accused of being exhausted, she replies by showing a new harvest. And what saints! what models! The Labres, the Germaine Cousins, the Marie Alacoques, the Cure's d'Ars! The greatest defiance thrown at our time, and the most violent antithesis of its ideas and instincts, is the actual Christianity in our midst--so hostile to the spirit of the world and the spirit of the age. II. Two men seem to represent and renew the periods that follow them, and the eternal tendencies of humanity. These two men offer a similitude and a contrariety so strange, that it seems as if God had opposed the one to the other to make the balance equal. Their skulls even, and the form of their faces, present striking analogies. The expression is contrary, but the mark is the same. {202} Both, born a hundred years apart, have inhabited the same country; both have passed the greater part of their lives in two villages that touch each other, and these two villages, so obscure before their time, have through them attained extraordinary celebrity. Each has been the object of the world's attention, and each the goal of eager pilgrimages. The eighteenth century rushed with ardor to Ferney; the nineteenth goes to Ars in greater transports. As the nineteenth century is to Catholics the retaliation for the eighteenth, so Ars is the retaliation for Ferney. [Footnote 90] [Footnote 90: This expression is from the Abbé Monnin, a missionary at Ars, who has given to the life of the Curé d'Ars several popular works of rare merit.] These are the resemblances, and great they are. The differences are greater still.