Supposing religious opinion to exist in its present form, if the _Génie du Christianisme_ were yet to be written, I would compose it quite differently: instead of recalling the benefits and the institutions of our religion in the past, I would show that Christianity is the thought of the future and of human liberty; that that redeeming and Messianic thought is the only basis of social equality; that it alone can establish the latter, because it places by the side of that equality the necessity of duty, the corrective and regulator of the democratic instinct. Legality is no sufficient restraint, because it is not permanent; it derives its strength from the law: now, the law is the work of men who pass away and differ. A law is not always obligatory; it can always be changed by another law: as opposed to that, morals are constant; they have their force within themselves, because they spring from the immutable order: they alone, therefore, can ensure permanency. I would show that, wherever Christianity has prevailed, it has changed ideas, rectified notions of justice and injustice, substituted assertion for doubt, embraced the whole of humanity in its doctrines and precepts. I would try to conjecture the distance at which we still are from the total accomplishment of the Gospel, by calculating the number of evils that have been destroyed and of improvements that have been effected in the eighteen centuries which have elapsed on this side of the Cross. Christianity acts slowly, because it acts everywhere; it does not cling to the reform of any particular society, it works upon society in general; its philanthropy is extended to all the sons of Adam: that is what it expresses with a marvellous simplicity in its commonest petitions, in its daily prayers, when it says to the crowd in the temple: "Let us pray for every suffering thing upon earth." What religion has ever spoken in this way? The Word was not made flesh in the man of pleasure, it became incarnate in the man of sorrow, with a view to the enfranchisement of all, to an universal brotherhood and an infinite salvation.