Between these paths how difficult the choice! 
       Ah! might I find some smoother, easier way. 
     “None such exists,” whispers a secret voice,
       “God is, or is not—­own, or slight, His sway.” 
     In sooth, I think so:  troubled souls in turn
       By each extreme are tossed and harassed sore: 
     They are but atheists, who feel no concern;
       If once they doubted they would sleep no more.[52]

The indifference of the critical philosophers is in fact only a transparent veil to atheistical doctrines.  Faith in God the Creator is in their eyes a superstition; this is their only settled dogma.  In other respects they indulge in theses the most contradictory.  Most generally they deify man, declaring that there is no other God than the idea of humanity, no other infinite than the indefinite character of the aspirations of our own soul.  At other times they proclaim an undisguised materialism, and look for the explanation of all things in atoms and in the law which governs them.  They make to themselves a two-faced idol, one of these faces being called nature, and the other humanity.  What strangely increases the confusion is that all the terms of language change meaning as employed by their pen.  They speak of God, of duty, of religion, of immortality; their pages seem sometimes to be extracted from mystical writings; but these sacred words have for them a totally different meaning than for the ordinary run of their readers.  Their God is not a Being, their religion is not a worship, their duty is not a law, their immortality is not the hope of a world to come.  Amidst these equivocations and contradictions thought is blunted, and the sinews of the intellect are unstrung.  The public, bewitched by talent and captivated by success, is deluged with writings which have the same effect as the talk of a frivolous man, or the showy tattle of a woman of the world.  They give an agreeable exercise to the mind, without ever allowing it to form either a precise idea or a settled judgment.

Many are the clouds then on the intellectual horizon of France.  Glance over the recent productions of French philosophy, and you will have no difficulty in recognizing the gravity of the situation.  Works are multiplying with the object of defending the existence of God, Providence, the immortality of the soul:  dams are being raised against the rising flood of atheism.[53] And here is a fact still more significant, namely, that the historians of ideas, whether they are recurring to the most remote antiquity, or are passing in review the worst errors of modern days, cannot meet with the negation of God, without having their eyes thus turned to Paris, and their attention directed to contemporary productions.[54]

I hence infer, that atheism is raising its head in France, and there presenting itself under two forms.  Materialism is appearing principally as an heritage from the last century.  The new, or rather renewed, doctrine is the adoration of man by man.  We are now going to cross the Rhine.