I have never been able to find this valuable work. When I do find it I shall institute a careful inquiry into the reasons which could have led five millions of French persons, or about one-seventh of the whole population of France, to take the pains to register themselves as 'atheists.' Presumably they must all have been adults, as the declaration, on such a subject, of infants, would scarcely, I take it, be collected, even by M. Jules Ferry, as evidence of the success of his great scheme for 'laicising' religion out of France. Meanwhile, I find it set down in the usual statistical authorities accessible in 1884, that out of the 36,102,021 inhabitants of France, 35,387,703 registered themselves, or were registered, as Catholics, 580,707 as Protestants, 40,439 as Israelites, and 81,951 as 'not professing any form of religion.' Yet I suppose that, if the eminent public man who saw, as in a vision, these five millions of registered atheists marching to the assault of Christianity in France were to announce their existence as a fact to a large public meeting in some great English provincial city to-morrow, we should have leaders in some of the English journals a day or two afterwards prognosticating the immediately impending downfall of all religion in France. Our modern democracies on both sides of the Atlantic have made such rapid and remarkable progress of late years in the art of forming opinions, that if Isaac Taylor could come back to the earth he left, not so very long ago, he would hardly, I think, recognise the planet. The fashion of taking it for granted that the whole world is fast going over to the gospel of ganglia and bathybius, of _vox populi et praeterea nihil_, is not confined to the 'fanatics of impiety' in France. I have heard it seriously stated in a London drawing-room by another public man of repute within the last year, that he believed 'Mr. John Bright and Mr. Gladstone were the last two men who would ever cite the Christian Scriptures as an authority in the House of Commons.' The uncommonly good English of the Christian Scriptures may perhaps constitute an objection to their free use in addressing popular political assemblies. But, admitting this, I hesitate to accept the statement. That it should have been made however, and made by a man of more than ordinary ability, is perhaps a thing to be noted. But I revert to France.