When I consider these facts with attention, I am astonished every day
that society subsists at all, that the burning lava of unruly passions
does not oftener make large fissures in the social soil, and overflow in
devastating torrents, bearing away at once palace and cottage, field and
workshop. This standing danger is drawing anxious attention, and we
hear the old adage repeated: "There must be a religion for the people."
There are men who wish to give the people a religion which they
themselves do not possess, acting like a man who, at once poor and
ostentatious, should give alms with counterfeit money. And what result
do they attain? We must have a religion for the people, say the
politicians, that they may secure the ends they have in view, and
conduct at their own pleasure the herds at their disposal. We must have
a religion for the people, say the rich, in order to keep peaceably
their property and their incomes. We must have a religion for the
people, say the _savants_, in order to remain quiet in their studies, or
in their academic chairs. What are they doing--these men without God,
who wish to preserve a faith for the use of the people? These
_savants_,--they say, and print it, that religion is an error necessary
for the multitudes who are incapable of rising to philosophy. Where is
it that they say it, and print it? Is it in drawing-rooms with closed
doors? Is it within the walls of Universities, or in scientific
publications which are out of the reach of the masses? No. They say it
in political journals, in reviews read by all the world; they print it
at full in books which are sold by thousands of copies. Their words are
spreading like a deleterious miasma through all classes of society.
Thoughtless men! (I am unwilling to suppose a cool calculation on their
part of money or of fame which should oblige me to say--heartless men),
thoughtless men! they do not see the inevitable consequences of their
own proceeding. The people hear and understand. The intellectual