zed by doubt allow to be
perpetrated have besides a sadder character than those which are
perpetrated by passions, which, wild and erring though they be, have a
certain nobleness in their origin. If I must be bound to the stake, I
had rather burn with the blind assent of a fanatical crowd, than in the
presence of an indifferent populace who came to look on. For just as
sceptics find all doctrines equally good, so they find all spectacles
equally instructive and curious.[35]

I have felt it necessary to insist on these considerations. Direct
attacks upon religious truth are perhaps less dangerous than the efforts
by which modern infidelity endeavors to estrange us from God, by
persuading us that doubt is the guarantee of liberty, and that belief
rivets the chains of bondage. Many consciences are disturbed by these
affirmations. It concerns us therefore to know that God is the great
Liberator of souls, and that forgetfulness of God is the road to
slavery. The faith which seeks to propagate itself by force inflicts
upon itself the harshest of contradictions. The spirit of doubt, in
order to become the spirit of violence, has only to transform itself
according to the laws of its proper nature.

And now to sum up. One of the noblest spectacles that earth can show,
is that of a community animated with a true and profound faith, in which
each man, using his best efforts to communicate his convictions to his
brethren, respects the while that which belongs to God in the inviolable
asylum of the conscience of others. But woe to the society formed by
sophists, in which opinion, benumbed by doubt and indifference, arouses
itself only to devote to hatred or to contempt every firm and noble
conviction!

To unsettle the idea of God, is to dry up its source the stream of the
veritable progress of modern society; it is to attack the foundations of
liberty, justice, and love. The material conquests of civilization would
serve thenceforward only to hasten the decomposition of the social body.
The pure idea of God is the true cause of the great progress of the
modern era; religion, in its generality, is, as Plutarch has told us,
the necessary condition to the very existence of society. This is what
remains for us to prove.

"How sacred is the society of citizens," said Cicero, "when the immortal
gods are interposed between them as judges and as witnesses."[36] Let us
raise still higher this lofty thought, and say: "How sacred is human