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or puerile, or superstitious, or, above all, tyrannical ; but, if it 
must elect between unbelief and Ultramontanism, it will not, 
at all events, choose atheism for its creed, and atheistic 
communism for its civil and political basis. Alas ! for the 
country which has before it such a dilemma. Alas ! for the 
country where the strongest champion against the name and 
spell of Voltaire is a Dupanloup ! Still, notwithstanding 
such disadvantages on the side of faith in its controversy with 
unbelief, it is a thing to be noted that, while at this moment 
the municipal Council of Paris remains unhappily true to its 
principles of democratic and atheistic irreligion, and had 
resolved to celebrate, with a statue and all public honours, 
the centenary of Voltaire, as representing the enfranchisement 
of the human mind from the yoke of priests and priestcraft, 
the French Republican Government has intervened to prevent 
any official action of the nature intended on the part of the 
Parisian Council. The nation at this point is in sympathy 
with the Government, not with the municipal officials of Paris 
— the brilliant but unhappy city of the Commune. 
The career of the famous — five-and-twenty years ago the 
epithet might have been infamous — Madame Dudevant, George 
Sand, is in this connection full of interest and instruction. 
That daring and very gifted woman waged war for years 
against all social decencies and all forms of religious belief. 
In her later years, howevei’, she greatly modified her views, 
and altogether changed her tone. She endeavoured to come 
to terms with Christianity ; she professed some form of quasi- 
Christian faith ; she even in the end, it is said, became 
reconciled to the Church, and died within its pale. Her case 
seems to me to be in a sense typical. She was eminently a 
representative women. Woman though she was, she was as 
justly representative of the genius of France as any man could 
have been, perhaps, indeed, more so. On the other hand, 
the case of Comte, grotesque as it is in some of its aspects, 
and mournful as it is throughout, teaches the same lesson as 
that of Madame Dudevant. Even France, even the French 
mind and character, cannot live without a religion, without a 
worship. The travesty of faith and worship adopted by 
Comte is a tribute even to Catholicism. He did homage to 
the faith of his country even by his own ritual of the worship 
of humanity. Thank God, English Christianity may command 
a more I’easonable allegiance than French Catholicism. The 
dilemma of France is not our dilemma, and England will not 
reject the Christianity of England for the sake of French or 
even English Comtism or Agnosticism. It will accept no 
religion of humanity which deprives every man living of 
