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and Greek faiths, which by a natural process has produced the 
religion of the modern world. — Again: a Pharisee, one Saul 
of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus is prostrated by some 
power to him invisible, and from being Christ's persecutor 
he becomes His apostle. — Natural reaction, say they, — common 
enough with ardent temperaments like his. Again : in the 
16th century, a monk groaning and weeping in a German 
convent, one day comes forth from his seclusion and proclaims to 
an astonished world the inaugural words of the Reformation, — 
“ The just shall live by faith." Oh S say they, Luther only 
obeyed the instinct of the Germanic races, which ever sought a 
spiritualistic religion, and revolted against the pretensions of 
Rome. 
In the present day a soul renounces the world, and tearing 
itself from a life of dissipation and vanity, dedicates itself to 
the service of God in love. They can only see in this the 
abnormal working of a natural law to which physiology shall one 
day give its correct nomenclature. Here, say they, is the only 
philosophy of history possible, beyond these explanations there 
can only be the arbitrary, the unforeseen, and science ignores 
utterly the one and the other. I am not exaggerating ; this is 
the predominant feeling in philosophical essays, scientific works, 
and treatises, the way with which men pretend to unlock the 
new science of the 19th century, — the ; critical history of 
religions. And since religion cannot be separated from morals, 
they apply the same method to both ; morality also, according 
to them, becomes an affair of race and temperament, its only 
rule is nature and physical law, and on a more exact science of 
nature they would base what they call the true independent 
morality which is to be the characteristic of the future. We have 
hitherto believed that the true basis of morality was responsi- 
bility, so that in shaking this, morality itself was disturbed. 
Mistake, say they, — the feeling of responsibility is only an 
illusion, which must disappear with that of moral liberty, the 
other illusion of a being subjected to unyielding laws ; and start- 
ing from this principle they see in evil only a mistake, a disease 
rather than a transgression, criminals are victims rather than 
guilty men; here again temperament explains all. The asylum 
must replace the prison, compassion take the place of justice. 
For these self-styled superior minds, moral aberrations have a 
singular attraction, and leaving sonorous denunciations to 
magistrates and preachers, they curiously study each variation 
of nature, they seek the fatal law that governs it, and flatter 
themselves they shall one day be able to enunciate it in a pro- 
position. All this is what we are told to-day with scientific 
serenity, which disdains declamation. Yet look at these new 
