h may well surprise us in an exact scientist--is
the influence upon human conduct which M. Garofalo attributes to the
religious sentiment. "Moral instruction has no meaning, or at least no
efficacy, without a religious basis" (p. 267). And from this erroneous
psychological premise, he draws the conclusion that it is necessary to
return to religious instruction in the schools, "selecting the masters
from among men of mature age, fathers of families or _ministers of
religion_" (p. 268).

In combating this conclusion, truly surprising in a scientist, it is
useless to recall the teachings of the experience of former times in
regard to the pretended moralizing influence of the priest upon the
school; and it is also unnecessary to recall the statistics of criminal
assaults committed by priests condemned to celibacy. It is equally
superfluous to add that at all events, in again turning the priest into
a schoolmaster, it would be necessary to recommend to him never to
recall the invectives of Jesus against the rich, the metaphor of the
camel passing through the eye of a needle, or the still more violent
invectives of the Fathers of the Church against private property; for
long before Proudhon, Saint Jerome had said that "wealth is always the
product of theft; if it was not committed by the present holder, it was
by his ancestors," and Saint Ambrose added that "Nature has established
community [of goods]; from usurpation alone is private property born."

If it is true that later on the Church, in proportion as it departed
from the doctrines of the Master, preached in favor of the rich,
leaving to the poor the hope of Paradise; and if it is true, as M.
Garofalo says, that "the Christian philosophers exhorted the poor to
sanctify the tribulations of poverty by resignation" (p. 166); it is
also true that, for example, Bossuet, in one of his famous sermons,
recognized that "the complaints of the poor are justified;" and he
asked: "Why are conditions so unequal? We are all formed of the same
dust, and nothing can justify it." So that recently, M. Giraud-Teulon,
in the name of an hermaphrodite liberalism, recalled that "the right of
private property is rather tolerated by the Church as an existing fact
than presented as a necessary foundation of civil society. It is even
condemned in its inspiring principle by the Fathers of the Church."[91]

But apart from all this, it is sufficient for me to establish that the
psychological premis