only does not meet with any refutation from men of science, but for the most part, finds, precisely among them, most definite confirmation. If, indeed, voices are at times heard, as that of Max Müller and others, which attribute to religion another origin and sense, these voices are unheard and unnoticed in the general and almost unanimous affirmation that religion is the outcome of ignorance and superstition.
Not long ago, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, if the most advanced thinkers rejected Catholicism, Protestantism, and Greek orthodoxy, as did the Encyclopedists at the end of the eighteenth, still not one of them denied that religion in general has been and is an indispensable condition in the lives of all. Not to mention the Deists—as Bernardin de St. Pierre, Diderot, and Rousseau—Voltaire raised a monument to God, and Robespierre proclaimed a festal day in honour of the Supreme Being. But at the present day, thanks to the frivolous and superficial teaching of Auguste Comte (who sincerely believed, in common with the majority of Frenchmen, that Christianity is nothing but Catholicism, and therefore saw in Catholicism the complete realisation of Christianity) the educated crowd, which always readily and greedily accepts the lowest view, have decided and acknowledged that religion is only a certain long obsolete aspect in the development of humanity which hinders progress. It is
