erviency to social
and political interests, have been too prone to place all the varieties
of belief in the same category, if not precisely on the same level, and
to regard with indifference, perhaps even with indulgence, the grossest
corruptions both of Natural and Revealed Religion. The world is surely
old enough, and its history sufficiently instructive, to prove, even to
the most indifferent statesmen, that truth is always salutary, and
error noxious, to the commonwealth, and that nowhere is society more
safe, orderly, or stable, than in those countries which are blessed with
"pure and undefiled religion." But let the opinion spread from the
prince to the peasant, from the aristocracy to the artisans, from the
philosopher to the public, that there is either no difference, or only a
slight and trivial one, between truth and error, that it matters little
what a man believes, or whether he believes at all: let the general mind
of the community become indoctrinated with such lessons, and it needs no
prophetic foresight to predict a crisis of unprecedented peril, an era
of reckless revolution. A philosophic dreamer may affect a calm
indifference, a bland and benignant Liberalism; but a nation, a
community, cannot be neutral or inert in regard to matters of faith: it
must and will be either religious or irreligious, it must either love
the truth or hate it: it is too sharp-sighted, and too much guided by
homely common sense, to believe that systems so opposite as Paganism and
Christianity, or Popery and Protestantism, are harmonious manifestations
of the same religious principle, or equally beneficial to the State.

FOOTNOTES:

[224] M. COUSIN, "Introduction," I. 318, 391, 405, 419; II. 134. Ibid.,
"Fragmens Philosophiques." Preface, VII.

[225] VALROGER, "Etudes Critiques," pp. 115, 126, 151, 308, 316. MARET,
"Essai sur Pantheisme," p. 249.

[226] P. LEROUX, "Sur l'Humanite," 2 vols.

[227] BUDDAEUS, "De Atheismo et Superstitione," pp. 184, 212.

[228] RICHARD BENTLEY, "On Freethinking," Boyle Lectures. VILLEMANDY,
"Scepticismus Debellatus," III. His words are remarkable:--"Passim haec,
aliaque generis ejusdem, placita disseminantur,--neque verum neque
bonum, qualia sunt in seipsis, posse dignosci; hinc que adeo sectandam
esse duntaxat cum veri, tum boni, similitudinem: quae si stent ac
valeant,--illud omne erit verum, illud omne aequum,--illud omne pium et
religiosum,--illud omne utile, quod _cuiquam tale videatur