sophists, in which opinion, benumbed by doubt and indifference, arouses
itself only to devote to hatred or to contempt every firm and noble
conviction!

To unsettle the idea of God, is to dry up its source the stream of the
veritable progress of modern society; it is to attack the foundations of
liberty, justice, and love. The material conquests of civilization would
serve thenceforward only to hasten the decomposition of the social body.
The pure idea of God is the true cause of the great progress of the
modern era; religion, in its generality, is, as Plutarch has told us,
the necessary condition to the very existence of society. This is what
remains for us to prove.

"How sacred is the society of citizens," said Cicero, "when the immortal
gods are interposed between them as judges and as witnesses."[36] Let us
raise still higher this lofty thought, and say: "How sacred is human
society, when, beneath the eye of the common Father, the inequalities of
life are accepted with patience and softened by love; when the poor and
the rich, as they meet together, remember that the Lord is the Maker of
them both; when a hope of immortality alleviates present evils, and when
the consciousness of a common dignity reduces to their true value the
passing differences of life!" Take away from human society God as
mediator, and the hopes founded in God as a source of consolation, and
what would you have remaining? The struggle of the poor against the
rich, the envy of the ignorant directed against the man who has
knowledge, the dullard's low jealousy of superior intelligence, hatred
of all superiority, and, by an almost inevitable reaction, the obstinate
defence of all abuses,--in one word, war--war admitting neither of
remedy nor truce. Such is the most apparent danger which now threatens
society.