ons
concede that this happiness will be realized during the life of the
individual himself, and the later religions, through an excess of
reaction, place its realization after death, outside the human world; in
the final phase, this realization of happiness is once more placed
within the field of human life, no longer in the ephemeral moment of the
individual existence, but indeed in the continuous evolution of all
mankind.

On this side, then, socialism is closely related to the religious
evolution, and tends to substitute itself for religion, since its aim is
for humanity to have its own "earthly paradise" here, without having to
wait for it in the _hereafter_, which, to say the least, is very
problematical.

Therefore, it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement
has many traits in common with, for example, primitive Christianity,
notably that ardent faith in the ideal that has definitively deserted
the arid field of bourgeois skepticism, and some savants, not
socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace, de Lavaleye and the Roberty, etc.,
admit that it is entirely possible for socialism to replace by its
humanitarian faith the faith in the hereafter of the former religions.

More direct and potent than these relations (between socialism and faith
in a hereafter) are, however, the relations which exist between
socialism and the belief in God.

It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt
(1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private
affairs[30] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious
intolerance under all its forms, whether it be directed against
Catholics[31] or against Jews, as I have shown in an article against
_Anti-Semitism_.[32] But this breadth of superiority of view is, at
bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final victory.

It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs,
whether one regards them, with Sergi,[33] as pathological phenomena of
human psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are
destined to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary
scientific culture. This is why socialism does not feel the necessity of
waging a special warfare against these religious beliefs which are
destined to disappear. It has assumed this attitude although it knows
that the absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the
most powerful factors for its extension, because the prie