Such are the consequences of scepticism for the leaders of a people.  What will those consequences be for the people themselves?  The spirit of indifference paralyzes the sources of generous sentiments, and ends in the same results as the spirit of cowardice.  And do you not know the part which cowardice has played in history?  If I may venture to call up here the most mournful recollections of modern times, do you not know that during the Reign of Terror, two or three hundred scoundrels instituted public massacres in the Capital of France, in the midst of a population shuddering with fright, but who let things go?  Now the characteristic of indifference is the letting things go.  If fanaticism has something to do with persecution, indifference has a great deal to do with it.  The crimes which minds paralyzed by doubt allow to be perpetrated have besides a sadder character than those which are perpetrated by passions, which, wild and erring though they be, have a certain nobleness in their origin.  If I must be bound to the stake, I had rather burn with the blind assent of a fanatical crowd, than in the presence of an indifferent populace who came to look on.  For just as sceptics find all doctrines equally good, so they find all spectacles equally instructive and curious.[35]

I have felt it necessary to insist on these considerations.  Direct attacks upon religious truth are perhaps less dangerous than the efforts by which modern infidelity endeavors to estrange us from God, by persuading us that doubt is the guarantee of liberty, and that belief rivets the chains of bondage.  Many consciences are disturbed by these affirmations.  It concerns us therefore to know that God is the great Liberator of souls, and that forgetfulness of God is the road to slavery.  The faith which seeks to propagate itself by force inflicts upon itself the harshest of contradictions.  The spirit of doubt, in order to become the spirit of violence, has only to transform itself according to the laws of its proper nature.

And now to sum up.  One of the noblest spectacles that earth can show, is that of a community animated with a true and profound faith, in which each man, using his best efforts to communicate his convictions to his brethren, respects the while that which belongs to God in the inviolable asylum of the conscience of others.  But woe to the society formed by sophists, in which opinion, benumbed by doubt and indifference, arouses itself only to devote to hatred or to contempt every firm and noble conviction!

To unsettle the idea of God, is to dry up its source the stream of the veritable progress of modern society; it is to attack the foundations of liberty, justice, and love.  The material conquests of civilization would serve thenceforward only to hasten the decomposition of the social body.  The pure idea of God is the true cause of the great progress of the modern era; religion, in its generality, is, as Plutarch has told us, the necessary condition to the very existence of society.  This is what remains for us to prove.