processions, lustrations, and the like, all of which aimed at anything but the moral improvement of the individual.  The whole of their so-called religion consisted, and particularly in the towns, in some of the deorum majorum gentium having temples here and there, in which the aforesaid worship was conducted as an affair of state, when in reality it was an affair of police.  No one, except the functionaries engaged, was obliged in any way to be present, or even to believe in it.  In the whole of antiquity there is no trace of any obligation to believe in any kind of dogma.  It was merely any one who openly denied the existence of the gods or calumniated them that was punished; because by so doing he insulted the state which served these gods; beyond this every one was allowed to think what he chose of them.  If any one wished to win the favour of these gods privately by prayer or sacrifice he was free to do so at his own cost and risk; if he did not do it, no one had anything to say against it, and least of all the State.  Every Roman had his own Lares and Penates at home, which were, however, at bottom nothing more than the revered portraits of his ancestors.  The ancients had no kind of decisive, clear, and least of all dogmatically fixed ideas about the immortality of the soul and a life hereafter, but every one in his own way had lax, vacillating, and problematical ideas; and their ideas about the gods were just as various, individual, and vague.  So that the ancients had really no religion in our sense of the word.  Was it for this reason that anarchy and lawlessness reigned among them?  Is not law and civil order rather so much their work, that it still constitutes the foundation of ours?  Was not property perfectly secure, although it consisted of slaves for the greater part?  And did not this condition of things last longer than a thousand years?

So I cannot perceive, and must protest against the practical aims and necessity of religion in the sense which you have indicated, and in such general favour to-day, namely, as an indispensable foundation of all legislative regulations.  For from such a standpoint the pure and sacred striving after light and truth, to say the least, would seem quixotic and criminal if it should venture in its feeling of justice to denounce the authoritative belief as a usurper who has taken possession of the throne of truth and maintained it by continuing the deception.

Demop. But religion is not opposed to truth; for it itself teaches truth.  Only it must not allow truth to appear in its naked form, because its sphere of activity is not a narrow auditory, but the world and humanity at large, and therefore it must conform to the requirements and comprehension of so great and mixed a public; or, to use a medical simile, it must not present it pure, but must as a medium make use of a mythical vehicle.  Truth may also be compared in this respect to certain chemical stuffs