their opinions
and their tastes, and to bid them tend with no interested motive, and as
it were by impulse, to pure feelings and elevated thoughts.

It is not certain that Socrates and his followers had very fixed
opinions as to what would befall man hereafter; but the sole point
of belief on which they were determined--that the soul has nothing in
common with the body, and survives it--was enough to give the Platonic
philosophy that sublime aspiration by which it is distinguished. It
is clear from the works of Plato, that many philosophical writers, his
predecessors or contemporaries, professed materialism. These writers
have not reached us, or have reached us in mere fragments. The same
thing has happened in almost all ages; the greater part of the most
famous minds in literature adhere to the doctrines of a supersensual
philosophy. The instinct and the taste of the human race maintain those
doctrines; they save them oftentimes in spite of men themselves, and
raise the names of their defenders above the tide of time. It must not
then be supposed that at any period or under any political condition,
the passion for physical gratifications, and the opinions which are
superinduced by that passion, can ever content a whole people. The heart
of man is of a larger mould: it can at once comprise a taste for the
possessions of earth and the love of those of heaven: at times it may
seem to cling devotedly to the one, but it will never be long without
thinking of the other.

If it be easy to see that it is more particularly important in
democratic ages that spiritual opinions should prevail, it is not easy
to say by what means those who govern democratic nations may make them
predominate. I am no believer in the prosperity, any more than in the
durability, of official philosophies; and as to state religions, I
have always held, that if they be sometimes of momentary service to the
interests of political power, they always, sooner or later, become
fatal to the Church. Nor do I think with those who assert, that to raise
religion in the eyes of the people, and to make them do honor to her
spiritual doctrines, it is desirable indirectly to give her ministers a
political influence which the laws deny them. I am so much alive to
the almost inevitable dangers which beset religious belief whenever
the clergy take part in public affairs, and I am so convinced that
Christianity must be maintained at any cost in the bosom of modern
demo