Lucretius, the
most of a nineteenth-century poem of any in antiquity, brings before us
with a feeling so vivid as to be almost a feeling of our own. Yet the
classical religion is a mild and tender specimen of the preserved
religions. To get at the worst, you should look where the destroying
competition has been least--at America, where sectional civilisation
was rare, and a pervading coercive civilisation did not exist; at such
religions as those of the Aztecs.

At first sight it seems impossible to imagine what conceivable function
such awful religions can perform in the economy of the world. And no
one can fully explain them. But one use they assuredly had: they fixed
the yoke of custom thoroughly on mankind. They were the prime agents of
the era. They put upon a fixed law a sanction so fearful that no one
could dream of not conforming to it. No one will ever comprehend the
arrested civilisations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early
society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes,
hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes
of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon
destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not. And then they a
themselves were caught in their own yoke. The customary discipline,
which could only be imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions,
continued with those sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the
propensities to variation which are the principle--of progress.
Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to
encourage the principle of originality. They will admit it in theory,
but in practice the old error--the error which arrested a hundred
civilisations--returns again. Men are too fond of their own life, too
credulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at the pain
of new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing existence;
or else, having new ideas, they want to enforce them on mankind--to
make them heard, and admitted, and obeyed before, in simple competition
with other ideas, they would ever be so naturally. At this very moment
there are the most rigid Comtists teaching that we ought to be governed
by a hierarchy--a combination of savans orthodox in science. Yet who
can doubt that Comte would have been hanged by his own hierarchy; that
his essor materiel, which was in fact troubled by the 'theologians and
metaphysicians' of the Polytechnic School, w