d to treat Religion
as if it were one department of life, instead of being the whole
foundation of every and all life. To treat it so is, of course,
to proclaim oneself as fundamentally irreligious--and, indeed,
very ignorant and uneducated.

"To resume, however:

"Religion at this period was at a very strange crisis. That it
could possibly be treated in the way I have mentioned shows how
very deeply irreligion had spread. There is no such thing, of
course, really as Irreligion--except by a purely conventional
use of the word: the 'irreligious' man is one who has made up
his mind either that there is no future world, or that it is so
remote, as regards effectivity, as to have no bearing upon
this. And that is a religion--at least it is a dogmatic
creed--as much as any other.

"The causes of this state of affairs I take to have been as follows:

"Religion up to the Reformation had been a matter of authority,
as it is again now; but the enormous development of various
sciences and the wide spread of popular 'knowledge' had, in the
first flush, distracted attention from that which is now, in all
civilized countries, simply an axiom of thought, viz., that a
Revelation of God must be embodied in a living authority
safeguarded by God. Further, at that time science and exact
knowledge generally had not reached the point which they reached
a little later--of corroborating in particular after particular,
so far as they are capable of doing so, the Revelation of God
known as Catholicism; and of knowing their limitations where they
cannot. Many sciences, at this time, had gone no further than to
establish certain facts which appeared, to the very imperfectly
educated persons of that period, to challenge and even to refute
certain facts or deductions of Revelation. Psychology, for
example, strange as it now appears in our own day, actually
seemed to afford other explanations of the Universe than that of
Revelation. (We will discuss details presently.) Social Science,
at that time, too, moved in the direction of Democracy and even
Socialism. I know it appears monstrous, and indeed almost
incredible, that men who really had some claim to be called
educated seriously maintained that the most stable and the most
reasonable method of government lay in the extension of the
franchise--that is, in reversing the whole eternal and logical
order of things, and permitting the inexpert to rule the expert,
and the uneducated and the ill-