"French Protestants," writes Mr. W. L. George,[5] "and French Jews are as devout, as clean-living, as spiritually minded as our most enlightened Churchmen and Nonconformists; a visit to any Parisian synagogue or to the Oratory will demonstrate in a moment that the French have not forgotten how to pray. The congregations are as large as ever they were, and they contain as great a proportion of men as in England." And he adds: "This distinction of sex must everywhere be made, and particularly in France, where Roman Catholicism flaunts a sumptuous aestheticism, voluptuous and worldly, capable of appealing both to the refined and to the sensuous." Mr. George believes that French Catholics have not turned against Christ, but against the ministers of the Christian religion in his land because they have been discovered to be unfaithful servants. It is his belief that the Church is dying--"dying hard but surely"; and who can quarrel with his statement that the people have turned their backs on its ministers, that they are on the threshold of agnosticism, and that the Church is putting forth no hand to stay them? The next two or three generations can scarcely fail to witness the death by atrophy of the Roman faith in France; but the French are not an irreligious people, and perhaps a wider faith may spring up from the ashes of the creed which is so fast growing cold. [5] _France in the Twentieth Century_--an admirable work. One might compare religious systems to the unresponsive edifices in which public worship is conducted, for they seem equally incapable of spontaneous adaptability to the needs of the people, and only the stress and labour of the laity ever produces any adaptation to the changing needs of those for whom the structure exists.