The world is surely old enough, and its history sufficiently instructive, to prove, even to the most indifferent statesmen, that truth is always salutary, and error noxious, to the commonwealth, and that nowhere is society more safe, orderly, or stable, than in those countries which are blessed with "pure and undefiled religion." But let the opinion spread from the prince to the peasant, from the aristocracy to the artisans, from the philosopher to the public, that there is either no difference, or only a slight and trivial one, between truth and error, that it matters little what a man believes, or whether he believes at all: let the general mind of the community become indoctrinated with such lessons, and it needs no prophetic foresight to predict a crisis of unprecedented peril, an era of reckless revolution.

A philosophic dreamer may affect a calm indifference, a bland and benignant Liberalism; but a nation, a community, cannot be neutral or inert in regard to matters of faith: it must and will be either religious or irreligious, it must either love the truth or hate it: it is too sharp-sighted, and too much guided by homely common sense, to believe that systems so opposite as Paganism and Christianity, or Popery and Protestantism, are harmonious manifestations of the same religious principle, or equally beneficial to the State.
FOOTNOTES: [224] M.COUSIN, "Introduction," I.318, 391, 405, 419; II.134.

Ibid., "Fragmens Philosophiques." Preface, VII.
[225] VALROGER, "Etudes Critiques," pp.

115, 126, 151, 308, 316.

MARET, "Essai sur Pantheisme," p.