denly emancipated from the servile education of more than three
centuries, and intoxicated with their moral liberty, find themselves in
the presence of a Church destitute of all mission, virtue, love for the
people, or adoration of truth or progress,--destitute even of faith in
itself. They see that the existing dogma is in flagrant contradiction of
the ruling idea that governs all the aspirations of the epoch, and that
its conception of divinity is inferior to that revealed by science,
human conscience, philosophy, and the improved conception of life
acquired by the study of the tradition of humanity, unknown to man
previously to the discovery of his Eastern origin. Therefore, in
order--as they believe--to establish their moral freedom radically and
forever, they reject alike all idea of a church, a dogma, and a God.

Philosophically speaking, the unreflecting exaggerations of men who have
just risen up in rebellion do not portend any serious damage to human
progress. These errors are a mere repetition of what has always taken
place at the decay and death of every dogma, and will--as they always
have done--sooner or later wear away. The day will come when our Italian
youth will discover that, just as reasonably as they, not content with
denying the Christian dogma, proceed to deny the existence of a God, and
the religious life of humanity, their ancestors might have proceeded,
from their denial and rejection of the feudal system, to the rejection
of every form of social organization, or have declared art extinct
forever during the transition period when the Greek form of art had
ceased to correspond to those aspirations of the human mind which
prepared the way for the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Christian
school of art.

Art, society, religion,--all these are faculties inseparable from human
life itself, progressive as life itself, and eternal as life itself.
Every epoch of humanity has had and will have its own social, artistic,
and religious _expression_. In every epoch man will ask of tradition and
of conscience whence he came, and to what goal he is bound; he will ask
through what paths that goal is to be reached, and seek to solve the
problem suggested by the existence within him of a conception of the
Infinite, and of an ideal impossible of realization in the finite
conditions of his earthly existence. He will, from time to time, adopt a
different solution, in proportion as the horizon of tradition is