t's _Des Progres de
l'esprit humain_, which seems to have been written as a warning to our
epoch: _Le zele religieux des philosophes et des grands n'etait qu'une
devotion politique: et toute religion, qu'on se permet de defendre comme
une croyance qu'il est utile de laisser au peuple, ne peut plus esperer
qu'une agonie plus ou moins prolongee_. In the whole course of the
events which I have pointed out you may always observe that belief and
knowledge bear the same relation to each other as the two scales of a
balance: when the one rises the other must fall. The balance is so
sensitive that it indicates momentary influences. For example, in the
beginning of this century the predatory excursions of French robbers
under their leader Buonaparte, and the great efforts that were requisite
to drive them out and to punish them, had led to a temporary neglect of
science, and in consequence to a certain decrease in the general
propagation of knowledge; the Church immediately began to raise her head
again and Faith to be revived, a revival partly of a poetical nature, in
keeping with the spirit of the times. On the other hand, in the more
than thirty years' peace that followed, leisure and prosperity promoted
the building up of science and the spread of knowledge in an exceptional
degree, so that the result was what I have said, the dissolution and
threatened fall of religion. Perhaps the time which has been so often
predicted is not far distant, when religion will depart from European
humanity, like a nurse whose care the child has outgrown; it is now
placed in the hands of a tutor for instruction. For without doubt
doctrines of belief that are based only on authority, miracles, and
revelation are only of use and suitable to the childhood of humanity.
That a race, which all physical and historical data confirm as having
been in existence only about a hundred times the life of a man sixty
years old, is still in its first childhood is a fact that every one will
admit.

_Demop_. If instead of prophesying with undisguised pleasure the
downfall of Christianity, you would only consider how infinitely
indebted European humanity is to it, and to the religion which, after
the lapse of some time, followed Christianity from its old home in the
East! Europe received from it a drift which had hitherto been unknown to
it--it learnt the fundamental truth that life cannot be an
end-in-itself, but that the true end of our existence lies beyond it