be justly invoked against the
authority of a religious institution as a remedial measure in a period
of transition; just as it may occasionally be necessary to isolate a
special locality for a given time, in order to protect others from
infection. But the cause must be explicitly declared. By declaring it,
you educate the country to look beyond the temporary measure,--to look
forward to a return to a normal state of things, and to study the
positive organic _principle_ destined to govern that normal state. By
keeping silence, you accustom the mass to disjoin the _moral_ from the
political, theory from practice, the ideal from the real, heaven from
earth.

When once all belief in the past synthesis shall be extinct, and faith
in the new synthesis established, the State itself will be elected into
a Church; it will incarnate in itself a religious principle, and become
the representative of the moral law in the various manifestations of
life.

So long as it is separate from the State, the Church will always
conspire to reconquer power over it in the interest of the past dogma.
If separated from all collective and avowed faith by a negative policy,
such as that adopted by the atheistic and indifferent French Parliament,
the State will fall a prey to the anarchical doctrine of the sovereignty
of the individual, and the worship of interest; it will sink into
egotism and the adoration of the _accomplished fact_, and hence,
inevitably, into despotism, as a remedy for the evils of anarchy.

For an example of this among modern nations, we have only to look at
France.

III.

On the other hand, in opposition to the Papacy, but itself a source of
no less corruption, stands _materialism_.

Materialism, the philosophy of all expiring epochs and peoples in decay,
is, historically speaking, an old phenomenon, inseparable from the death
of a religious dogma. It is the reaction of those superficial intellects
which, incapable of taking a comprehensive view of the life of humanity,
and tracing and deducing its essential characteristics from tradition,
deny the religious ideal itself, instead of simply affirming the death
of one of its incarnations.

Luther compared the human mind to a drunken peasant, who, falling from
one side of his horse, and set straight on his seat by one desirous of
helping him, instantly falls again on the other side. The simile--if
limited to periods of transition--is most just. The youth of Italy,
sud