Theology from the domain of human knowledge.

1. It is worthy of notice how completely the Infidel party have shifted
their ground and changed their tactics since the era of the first French
Revolution; and how utterly inconsistent are the arguments of M. Comte
and the Positive School with those of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists.
Formerly, Religion was wont to be ascribed to priestcraft; it was
supposed to have been invented by fraud, supported by falsehood, and
professed in hypocrisy; and the Church, but especially the hierarchy of
Rome, was the object of incessant ridicule or malignant abuse. But now,
Religion is discovered to be the natural, necessary, and salutary result
of the legitimate action of the human faculties in the earlier stages of
their development, the initial impellent of social progress, the
indispensable condition of advancing civilization; and, on the broad,
general principle that sincerity of conviction is essential to
wide-spread success, the theory which ascribes its origin to the fraud
or the policy, whether of kings, or priests, or fanatics, is scouted as
a mere delirium of Voltaire, or as one of those revolutionary prejudices
of his disastrous era which were alike irrational and injurious. And the
Church, so far from being ridiculed or maligned, is lauded above measure
as the highest extant product of _human_ wisdom; Catholicism is even
preferred to Christianity itself, as a manifest improvement on the more
primitive form of faith and worship; it is declared to be the
indispensable basis of the future reorganization of society, which, when
it shall have been freed from all theological influence, its only point
of weakness, will still survive, with its separate speculative class,
its imposing public forms, and its splendid hierarchy,--an Atheistic
society, but still Catholic and One.[67] The change, in this respect,
between the opinions which prevailed, respectively, at the era of the
_first_ and that of the _second_ Revolution, is at once striking and
instructive. It shows how variable and vacillating is the wretched creed
of Infidelity, and how the firm maintenance of truth will eventually
compel the homage, even where it may not succeed in carrying the
convictions, of speculative minds. That Religion in all its successive
forms, from the rudest Fetishism up to the sublimest Christian
Monotheism, has been the natural and genuine product of human
intelligence, working ever onward and upward