is incomplete. What is this humanity to which man owes himself? An
abstraction, an idol still, an idol to be overthrown if he would obtain
perfect independence. Listen to the German Stirmer, deducing from the
doctrine its extreme consequences: "Perish the people," he exclaims,
"perish Germany, perish all the nations of Europe; and let man, rid of
all bonds, delivered from the last phantoms of religion, recover at
length his full independence!"[59] All the mists of abstraction have now
disappeared: here we are on ground which is hideously clear. Humanity is
no longer in question, but the worship of _self_; it is the complete
enfranchisement of selfishness.

While the proud idealism of the Germans was thus, by its own weight,
descending into the level flats of thought, a political movement was
agitating Germany. Simple-minded poets were celebrating atheism with an
enthusiasm which seemed sincere; and, at the same time, men who are not
simple-minded, journalists and demagogues, were laying hold of the
irreligion as a lever with which to make a breach in the social edifice.
In the year 1845, the attention of the Swiss authorities was drawn to
certain secret societies, composed of Germans, and having for their
object a revolution in Germany, but which had established their basis of
operations on the Swiss territory. The inquiries of the police issued in
the discovery of twenty-seven clubs bound together by secret
correspondence. Working-men were induced on various pretexts to attend
meetings, of which the real object was only gradually disclosed to
them. If they were reckoned worthy, they were initiated into the plan of
a social reform, the basis of which was atheism.[60] One of the
principal agents in this work of proselytism, Guillaume Marr, exclaimed:
"Faith in a personal and living God is the origin and the fundamental
cause of our miserable social condition." And he deduced as follows the
practical consequence of his theory: "The idea of God is the key-stone