nces use God as a kind of bogey to frighten
grown-up children to bed with, if nothing else avails: that's why they
attach so much importance to the Deity. Very well. Let me, in passing,
recommend our rulers to give their serious attention, regularly twice
every year, to the fifteenth chapter of the First Book of Samuel, that
they may be constantly reminded of what it means to prop the throne on
the altar. Besides, since the stake, that _ultima ration theologorum_,
has gone out of fashion, this method of government has lost its
efficacy. For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms; they shine
only when it is dark. A certain amount of general ignorance is the
condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist.
And as soon as astronomy, natural science, geology, history, the
knowledge of countries and peoples have spread their light broadcast,
and philosophy finally is permitted to say a word, every faith founded
on miracles and revelation must disappear; and philosophy takes its
place. In Europe the day of knowledge and science dawned towards the end
of the fifteenth century with the appearance of the Renaissance
Platonists: its sun rose higher in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries so rich in results, and scattered the mists of the Middle Age.
Church and Faith were compelled to disappear in the same proportion; and
so in the eighteenth century English and French philosophers were able
to take up an attitude of direct hostility; until, finally, under
Frederick the Great, Kant appeared, and took away from religious belief
the support it had previously enjoyed from philosophy: he emancipated
the handmaid of theology, and in attacking the question with German
thoroughness and patience, gave it an earnest instead of a frivolous
tone. The consequence of this is that we see Christianity undermined in
the nineteenth century, a serious faith in it almost completely gone; we
see it fighting even for bare existence, whilst anxious princes try to
set it up a little by artificial means, as a doctor uses a drug on a
dying patient. In this connection there is a passage in Condorcet's
"_Des Progres de l'esprit humain_" which looks as if written as a
warning to our age: "the religious zeal shown by philosophers and great
men was only a political devotion; and every religion which allows
itself to be defended as a belief that may usefully be left to the
people, can only hope for an agony more or less prolonged." I