spise or lament. According to others, again, some favor might be granted to Jupiter and Olympus, for whom magnificent temples and beautiful statues had been erected; but the Hood of historical indignation must be turned upon the shame of shames, of Christianity and the middle ages. Such aberrations, with all their variations, form a vast network of prejudices which is not yet broken up and which still holds bound in its toils the whole radical party of France."
Some minds, struck by the ills which religions have engendered, are willing to admit the utility and even the necessity of hierography; but they do not pretend to look for anything in the science but arguments, or weapons, with which to contest the various forms of belief around them.
Is there any need of explaining that such can not be the purpose of this course? In saying that I will try to treat religions by the processes of science, I am by implication engaged to make neither an antireligious polemic nor a religious propaganda. Parties and sects are at liberty to draw all the conclusions they please from science; but science should never stoop to be their instrument or sign.
When, in 1879, the French Senate discussed the scheme for introducing the history of religions into the Collége de France, Edouard de Laboulaye became the spokesman of a prejudice that disputes even the possibility of using historical methods in the study of any religion, saying: "When you believe it is true, everything will seem natural to you. When you believe it is false, everything will seem absurd. How are you going to find a way of teaching impartially?"
Henry Martin replied: "I do not say that the comparative history of religions will be to the profit of intolerant religious ideas that proscribe one another as they proscribe irreligious ideas; but it will surely be to the profit of the idea of that universal religion which lies at the bottom of all religions, and is their essence."
I will go further, and say that the historian of religions need not be at the trouble of asking whether the object of the religious sentiment is real or not, or, in other words, whether the belief in the existence of the Deity is well-founded or illusory.
I would also add that, to write the history of religions, it would be necessary to put one's self at the positivist point of view, provided this phrase is not taken to signify a formal adhesion to the philosophical system of Auguste Comte, who also has come to hierography with a preconceived theory. Here, again, I enter upon a new order of prejudice, the philosophical prejudice, or that which involves finding in the facts the confirmation of a doctrine determined upon in advance. Orthodox positivism omits from its scientific classification, experimental psychology, the study of which is indispensable, as Herbert Spencer declares, for obtaining the key to the religious sentiment and its evolutions. When the positivists affirm that man must pass, in his individual and social development, through the theological, metaphysical, and positive
