Even the idea of progress and
reform has never been anywhere absent; nothing, in short, of that
which constitutes social life has been entirely ignored or
misconceived by any religious nation. Why, then, once more, this
tautology of Society-Divinity, if it is true, as is pretended,
that the theological hypothesis contains nothing other than the
ideal of human society, the preconceived type of humanity
transfigured by equality, solidarity, labor, and love?
Certainly, if there is a prejudice, a mysticism, which now seems
to me deceptive in a high degree, it is no longer Catholicism,
which is disappearing, but rather this humanitary philosophy,
making man a holy and sacred being on the strength of a
speculation too learned not to have something of the arbitrary in
its composition; proclaiming him God,--that is, essentially good
and orderly in all his powers, in spite of the disheartening
evidence which he continually gives of his doubtful morality;
attributing his vices to the constraint in which he has lived,
and promising from him in complete liberty acts of the purest
devotion, because in the myths in which humanity, according to
this philosophy, has painted itself, we find described and
opposed to each other, under the names of hell and paradise, a
time of constraint and penalty and an era of happiness and
independence! With such a doctrine it would suffice--and
moreover it would be inevitable--for man to recognize that he is
neither God, nor good, nor holy, nor wise, in order to fall back
immediately into the arms of religion; so that in the last
analysis all that the world will have gained by the denial of God
will be the resurrection of God.
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