And now, if we are permitted to ask in the name of common-sense, why should Christian mystics be taxed with credulity or the spiritualists be consigned to Bedlam, when a _religion_ embodying such revolting absurdity finds disciples even among Academicians?—when such insane rhapsodies as the following can be uttered by the mouth of Comte and admired by his followers: “My eyes are dazzled;—they open each day more and more to the increasing coincidence between the social advent of the _feminine mystery_, and the mental decadence of the eucharistical sacrament. Already the Virgin has dethroned God in the minds of Southern Catholics! Positivism realizes the Utopia of the mediæval ages, by representing all the members of the great family as the issue of a _virgin mother without a husband_....” And again, after giving the _modus operandi_: “The development of the _new process_ would soon cause to spring up a caste without heredity, better adapted than vulgar procreation to the recruitment of spiritual chiefs, or even temporal ones, whose authority would then rest upon an origin truly superior, which would not _shrink from an investigation_.”[162] To this we might inquire with propriety, whether there has ever been found in the “vagaries of Spiritualism,” or the mysteries of Christianity, anything more preposterous than this ideal “coming race.” If the tendency of materialism is not grossly belied by the behavior of some of its advocates, those who publicly preach polygamy, we fancy that whether or not there will ever be a sacerdotal stirp so begotten, we shall see no end of progeny,—the offspring of “mothers without husbands.” How natural that a philosophy which could engender such a caste of didactic incubi, should express through the pen of one of its most garrulous essayists, the following sentiments: “This is a sad, a very {82} sad age,[163] full of dead and dying faiths; full of idle prayers sent out in vain search for the departing gods. But oh! it is a glorious age, full of the golden light which streams from the ascending sun of science! What shall we do for those who are shipwrecked in faith, _bankrupt in intellect_, but ... who seek comfort in the _mirage of spiritualism_, the delusions of transcendentalism, or the _will o’ the wisp_ of mesmerism?...”