engaged in destroying.

"Thus," he says, "there arose a Christianity more and more
simplified, and reduced at length to a vague and powerless
theism, which, by a strange medley of terms, the metaphysicians
distinguished by the title of _natural religion_, as if all
religion was not inevitably _supernatural_. In pretending to
direct the social reorganization after this vain conception,
the metaphysic school, notwithstanding its destination purely
revolutionary, has always implicitly adhered, and does so,
especially and distinctly, at the present day, to the most
fundamental principle of the ancient political doctrine--that
which represents the social order as necessarily reposing on a
theological basis. This is now the most evident, and the most
pernicious inconsistency of the metaphysic doctrine. Armed with
this concession, the school of Bossuet and De Maistre will
always maintain an incontestable logical superiority over the
irrational detractors of Catholicism, who, while they proclaim
the want of a religious organization, reject, nevertheless, the
elements indispensable to its realization. By such a concession
the revolutionary school concur in effect, at the present day,
with the retrograde, in preventing a right organization of
modern societies, whose intellectual condition more and more
interdicts a system of politics founded on theology."

Our readers will doubtless agree with us, that this review of political
parties (though seen through an extract which we have been compelled to
abbreviate in a manner hardly permissible in quoting from an author)
displays a singular originality and power of thought; although each one
of them will certainly have his own class of objections and exceptions