religion would have carried out her object and completed
her course: the race she had brought to years of discretion she could
dismiss, and herself depart in peace: that would be the _euthanasia_ of
religion. But as long as she lives, she has two faces, one of truth, one
of fraud. According as you look at one or the other, you will bear her
favor or ill-will. Religion must be regarded as a necessary evil, its
necessity resting on the pitiful imbecility of the great majority of
mankind, incapable of grasping the truth, and therefore requiring, in
its pressing need, something to take its place.

_Demopheles_. Really, one would think that you philosophers had truth in
a cupboard, and that all you had to do was to go and get it!

_Philalethes_. Well, if we haven't got it, it is chiefly owing to the
pressure put upon philosophy by religion at all times and in all places.
People have tried to make the expression and communication of truth,
even the contemplation and discovery of it, impossible, by putting
children, in their earliest years, into the hands of priests to be
manipulated; to have the lines, in which their fundamental thoughts are
henceforth to run, laid down with such firmness as, in essential
matters, to be fixed and determined for this whole life. When I take up
the writings even of the best intellects of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, (more especially if I have been engaged in
Oriental studies), I am sometimes shocked to see how they are paralyzed
and hemmed in on all sides by Jewish ideas. How can anyone think out the
true philosophy when he is prepared like this?

_Demopheles_. Even if the true philosophy were to be discovered,
religion wouldn't disappear from the world, as you seem to think. There
can't be one system of metaphysics for everybody; that's rendered
impossible by the natural differences of intellectual power between man
and man, and the differences, too, which education makes. It is a
necessity for the great majority of mankind to engage in that severe
bodily labor which cannot be dispensed with if the ceaseless
requirements of the whole race are to be satisfied. Not only does this
leave the majority no time for education, for learning, for
contemplation; but by virtue of the hard and fast antagonism between
muscles and mind, the intelligence is blunted by so much exhausting
bodily labor, and becomes heavy, clumsy, awkward, and consequently
incapable of grasping any other than quite