antiquity in China, in Babylonia, and in Egypt, caused a certain
progress to be made in religion. China arrived very early at a sort of
mediocre good sense, which prevented great extravagances. She neither
knew the advantages nor the abuses of the religious spirit. At all
events, she had not in this way any influence in directing the great
current of humanity. The religions of Babylonia and Syria were never
freed from a substratum of strange sensuality; these religions
remained, until their extinction in the fourth and fifth centuries of
our era, schools of immorality, in which at intervals glimpses of the
divine world were obtained by a sort of poetic intuition. Egypt,
notwithstanding an apparent kind of Fetichism, had very early
metaphysical dogmas and a lofty symbolism. But doubtless these
interpretations of a refined theology were not primitive. Man has
never, in the possession of a clear idea, amused himself by clothing
it in symbols: it is oftener after long reflections, and from the
impossibility felt by the human mind of resigning itself to the
absurd, that we seek ideas under the ancient mystic images whose
meaning is lost. Moreover, it is not from Egypt that the faith of
humanity has come. The elements which, in the religion of a Christian,
passing through a thousand transformations, came from Egypt and Syria,
are exterior forms of little consequence, or dross of which the most
purified worships always retain some portion. The grand defect of the
religions of which we speak was their essentially superstitious
character. They only threw into the world millions of amulets and
charms. No great moral thought could proceed from races oppressed by a
secular despotism, and accustomed to institutions which precluded the
exercise of individual liberty.

The poetry of the soul--faith, liberty, virtue, devotion--made their
appearance in the world with the two great races which, in one sense,