“How sacred is the society of citizens,” said Cicero, “when the immortal gods are interposed between them as judges and as witnesses."[36] Let us raise still higher this lofty thought, and say:  “How sacred is human society, when, beneath the eye of the common Father, the inequalities of life are accepted with patience and softened by love; when the poor and the rich, as they meet together, remember that the Lord is the Maker of them both; when a hope of immortality alleviates present evils, and when the consciousness of a common dignity reduces to their true value the passing differences of life!” Take away from human society God as mediator, and the hopes founded in God as a source of consolation, and what would you have remaining?  The struggle of the poor against the rich, the envy of the ignorant directed against the man who has knowledge, the dullard’s low jealousy of superior intelligence, hatred of all superiority, and, by an almost inevitable reaction, the obstinate defence of all abuses,—­in one word, war—­war admitting neither of remedy nor truce.  Such is the most apparent danger which now threatens society.

When I consider these facts with attention, I am astonished every day that society subsists at all, that the burning lava of unruly passions does not oftener make large fissures in the social soil, and overflow in devastating torrents, bearing away at once palace and cottage, field and workshop.  This standing danger is drawing anxious attention, and we hear the old adage repeated:  “There must be a religion for the people.”  There are men who wish to give the people a religion which they themselves do not possess, acting like a man who, at once poor and ostentatious, should give alms with counterfeit money.  And what result do they attain?  We must have a religion for the people, say the politicians, that they may secure the ends they have in view, and conduct at their own pleasure the herds at their disposal.  We must have a religion for the people, say the rich, in order to keep peaceably their property and their incomes.  We must have a religion for the people, say the savants, in order to remain quiet in their studies, or in their academic chairs.  What are they doing—­these men without God, who wish to preserve a faith for the use of the people?  These savants,—­they say, and print it, that religion is an error necessary for the multitudes who are incapable of rising to philosophy.  Where is it that they say it, and print it?  Is it in drawing-rooms with closed doors?  Is it within the walls of Universities, or in scientific publications which are out of the reach of the masses?  No.  They say it in political journals, in reviews read by all the world; they print it at full in books which are sold by thousands of copies.  Their words are spreading like a deleterious miasma through all classes of society.  Thoughtless men! (I am unwilling to suppose a cool calculation on their part of money or of fame which should oblige me to say—­heartless