that they only are free, because they have abandoned the common beliefs?  We will tell them that they are deceiving themselves by taking for their own personal thought the debris of the tradition of the human race.  We will add that their pretended independence is a veritable slavery.  A strange sort of liberty that, which should forbid those who affect it to accept a faith which appeared to them to be true, because they were not the inventors of it.  Listen to this wise reflection of a contemporary writer:  “Philosophy allows us to range ourselves on the side of Platonism:  why should it not also allow us to range ourselves on the side of the Christian faith, if there it is that we find wisdom and immutable truth?  The choice ought to seem as free and as worthy of respect on the one side as on the other; and philosophy which claims liberty for itself, is least of all warranted in refusing it to others."[18] To be free, is to look for truth wherever it may be found, and it is to obey truth wherever we meet with it.  When the question therefore relates to God, or to the soul and its eternal destinies,—­to the man who asks me, Are you occupied with religion or philosophy?  I have only one answer to give:  I am a man, and I am seeking truth.

A final consideration will perhaps put these thoughts in a more striking light.  If you think the most important of the discussions of our day to be that between natural and revealed religion, between deism and the Gospel, you have not well discerned the signs of the times.  The fundamental discussion is now between men who believe in God, in the soul, and in truth, and men, who, denying truth, deny at the same time the soul and God.  When these high problems are in question, periodicals and other publications, which have the widest circulation, and which gain admission into every household, bring us too often the works of writers without convictions, eager to spread amongst others the doubt which has devoured their own beliefs.  They have received entire, and without losing an obole of it, the heritage of the Greek Sophists.  They involve in fact in the same proscription Socrates and Jesus Christ, Paul of Tarsus and Plato of Athens:  they have no more respect for the opinions of Descartes and Leibnitz than for those of Pascal and Bossuet.  The great question of the day is to know whether our desire of truth is a chimaera; whether our effort to reach the divine world is a spring into the empty void.  When the question relates to God, inasmuch as He is the basis of reason no less than the object of faith, all the barriers which exist elsewhere disappear:  to defend faith is to defend reason; to defend reason is to defend faith.  The unbridled audacity of those who deny fundamental truths is bringing ancient adversaries, for a moment at least, to fight beneath the same flag.  What they would rob us of, is not merely this or that article of a definite creed, but all faith whatever in Divine Providence, every hope