Christianity is stable in its dogma and mobile in its enlightenment; its transformation involves the universal transformation. When it has reached its highest point, the darkness will become completely lightened; liberty, crucified on Calvary with the Messiah, will descend from it with Him; it will hand to the nations that new Testament written in its favour and hitherto trammelled in its clauses. Governments will pass away, moral evil will disappear, rehabilitation will proclaim the consummation of the centuries of death and oppression born of the Fall. When will that longed-for day arrive? When will society reconstruct itself after the secret methods of the generating principle? None can say; it is impossible to calculate the resistance of the passions. [Sidenote: Christian liberty.] More than once will death enervate races of men and shed silence upon events even as snow falling during the night deadens the noise of the traffic. Nations do not grow up so rapidly as the individuals of whom they are composed, nor do they disappear so quickly. How long does it not take to attain a single thing sought after! The death-agony of the Lower Empire threatened to be endless; the Christian Era, already so extensive, has not sufficed to abolish servitude. These calculations, I know, do not suit the French temper; in our revolutions, we have never admitted the element of time: that is why we are always wonder-struck at results contrary to our impatience. Full of generous courage, young men rush onwards; they make straight for a lofty region which they see dimly and which they strive to reach: nothing could be worthier of admiration; but they will wear out their lives in those efforts and, coming to the end, after disappointment upon disappointment, they will consign the weight of the years of deception to other deluded generations, which will carry it on to the next tombs; and so on. The time of the desert has returned; Christianity is beginning over again, in the barrenness of the Thebaid, amid a formidable idolatry, the idolatry of man for himself. There are two kinds of consequences in history: one is immediate and instantly known; the other distant and not seen at once. Those two consequences are often contradictory: the first come from our short wisdom, the others from long-continued wisdom. The providential event appears after the human event. God rises behind men. Deny the Supreme Counsel as much as you please; do not consent to its action; dispute about words; call what the vulgar call Providence the force of things or reason; but look at the end of an accomplished fact, and you shall see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected of it, when it was not first established on morals and justice.