vast social body is animated by the spirit of life and of progress.  But in the solemn phase through which she is passing, Russia is exposed to a great danger.  She is running the risk of substituting for a national development, drawn from the grand springs of human nature, a factitious civilization, in which would figure together the fashions of Paris, the morals of the coulisses of the Opera, and the most irreligious doctrines of the West.  May God preserve her!

We have passed in review some of the symptoms of the revival of atheism, and it is impossible not to acknowledge the gravity of the facts which we have established.  What must especially awaken solicitude is, that the irreligious manifestations of thought have assumed such a character of generality, that the sorrowful astonishment which they ought to produce in us is blunted by habit.  Fashionable reviews, (I allude especially to the French-speaking public), widely-circulated journals which take good care not to violate propriety, and which could not with impunity offend the interests or prejudices of the social class from which their subscribers are recruited, are able to entertain without danger, and without exciting energetic protestations, the productions of an open, or scarcely disguised, atheism.  Here are ample reasons for thoughtfulness; but this thoughtfulness must not be mingled with fear.  We have to do with a challenge the very audacity of which inspires me with confidence, rather than with dread.  In fact all the productions of irreligious philosophy rest on one and the same thought, the common watchword, of the secularism of the English, of the rationalism of the Italians, of the positivism of the French, and which may even be recognized, with a little attention, under the haughty formulas which bear the name of Hegel.  And the thought is this:  The earth is enough for us, away with heaven; man suffices for himself, away with God; reality suffices for us, away with chimeras!  Wisdom consists in contenting ourselves with the world as it is.  It is attempted ridiculously enough to place this wisdom under the patronage of the luminaries of our age.  We are bidden, forsooth, to see in the negation of the real and living God, a conflict of progress with routine, of science with a blind tradition, of the modern mind with superannuated ideas.[88] We know of old this defiance hurled against the aspirations of the heart, the conscience, and the reason.  We know the destined issue of this ancient revolt of the intellect against the laws of its own nature.  There were atheists in Palestine in the days when the Psalmist exclaimed, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."[89] There were atheists at Rome when Cicero wrote,[90] that the opinion which recognizes gods appeared to him to come nearest to the resemblance of truth.  A poet of the thirteenth century has expressed in a Latin verse the thoughts which are in vogue among a great many of our contemporaries: