society, when, beneath the eye of the common Father, the inequalities of
life are accepted with patience and softened by love; when the poor and
the rich, as they meet together, remember that the Lord is the Maker of
them both; when a hope of immortality alleviates present evils, and when
the consciousness of a common dignity reduces to their true value the
passing differences of life!" Take away from human society God as
mediator, and the hopes founded in God as a source of consolation, and
what would you have remaining? The struggle of the poor against the
rich, the envy of the ignorant directed against the man who has
knowledge, the dullard's low jealousy of superior intelligence, hatred
of all superiority, and, by an almost inevitable reaction, the obstinate
defence of all abuses,--in one word, war--war admitting neither of
remedy nor truce. Such is the most apparent danger which now threatens
society.

When I consider these facts with attention, I am astonished every day
that society subsists at all, that the burning lava of unruly passions
does not oftener make large fissures in the social soil, and overflow in
devastating torrents, bearing away at once palace and cottage, field and
workshop. This standing danger is drawing anxious attention, and we
hear the old adage repeated: "There must be a religion for the people."
There are men who wish to give the people a religion which they
themselves do not possess, acting like a man who, at once poor and
ostentatious, should give alms with counterfeit money. And what result
do they attain? We must have a religion for the people, say the
politicians, that they may secure the ends they have in view, and
conduct at their own pleasure the herds at their disposal. We must have
a religion for the people, say the rich, in order to keep peaceably
their property and their incomes. We must have a religion for the
people, say the _savants_, in order to remain quiet in their studies, or
in their academic chairs. What are they doing--these men without God,
who wish to preserve a faith for the use of the people? These
_savants_,--they say, and print it, that religion is an error necessary
for the multitudes who are incapable of rising to philosophy. Where is
it that they say it, and print it? Is it in drawing-rooms with closed
doors? Is it within the walls of Universities, or in scientific
publications which are out of the reach of the masses? No. They say it
in political journals,