those who, averse from definite articles of faith,
and prone to latitudinarian license, have studiously set themselves to
disparage the importance of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, and
even to obliterate the distinction between the various forms of
Religion, natural and revealed, by representing them all as so many
varieties of the same religious sentiment, so many diverse, but not
antagonistic, embodiments of the same radical principle. In the writings
of Pope, several expressions occur which are easily susceptible of this
construction, and which have often been quoted and applied in defence of
Religious Liberalism, notwithstanding his explicit disavowal of it in
his letter to the younger Racine, prefixed to the collected edition of
his works. But on the continent of Europe, Syncretism has been much more
fully developed, and fearlessly applied to every department of human
thought. Pushed to its ultimate consequences, it obliterates the
distinction not only between truth and error, but also between virtue
and vice, nay even between Religion and Atheism; and represents them all
as constituent parts of a scheme, which is developed under a law of
"fatal necessity," but which is described also as a scheme of
"optimism." Its range is supposed to be unlimited: for it has been
applied to the History of Philosophy, by Cousin, to the theory of the
Passions, by Fourier, to the doctrines of Christianity, by Quinet and
Michelet, and to the Philosophy of Religion, by Benjamin Constant. The
practical result of such speculations is a growing _skepticism_ or
_indifference_ in regard to the distinction between truth and error, and
a very faint impression of the difference between good and evil.[225]
The speculations of Pierre Leroux, the head, if not the founder, of the
Humanitarian School, are strongly tinged with this spirit: they amount
to a justification of evil, an apotheosis of man.[226]

We do not class these speculations among the formal systems of Atheism,
although they have often been associated with it; but we advert to them
as specimens of that style of thinking which has a natural tendency to
induce an atheistic frame of mind.[227] The profession of such
sentiments is a symptom rather of incipient danger, than of confirmed
disease. But that danger is far from being either doubtful or
insignificant. For should the distinction between "truth and error" be
obliterated or even feebly discerned, should it come to be rega