We require harmony also and agreement between religion and policy. Called to act on the same individual, and as a final attempt for the same result, how can they work together unless possessing a common basis of thought, sentiments, and designs? Whatever distance may intervene, there is an intimate connection between the earthly and religious ideas of men, between their desires for time and those for eternity. Did incoherence and contradiction alone exist, were our affairs, opinions, and hopes here completely estranged from those beyond this world, were religion capable only of improving and sustaining our actual life and society, their ideas, works, institutions and manners, far from serving the cause of, and mutually assisting each other would reciprocally fetter and weaken one another. The world would jest at piety, piety would take offence at the world, and that which should be upon earth the source of order and peace would become a fresh spring of anarchy and war. And let neither religion or policy be alarmed about its independence and dignity. I do not wish that either should purchase by cowardly concession or costly sacrifice the harmony which ought to prevail between them. On the contrary, I wish they should on all occasions act according to the pure truth of things, and accomplish together their special and peculiar mission. {58} Clever men have looked upon religion as a source of order, a sort of social police, a useful and even indispensable matter, but otherwise without intrinsic value or any real and definite importance to the individual, unless to afford a chimerical satisfaction to certain weaknesses of the human mind and heart. Thence arises a superficial and hypocritical respect, which barely covers a disdainful coldness ill-calculated to resist any prolonged trial, which humiliates religion if she is content with it, or otherwise irritates and misleads her. Great and religious men have in their turn looked on the world and the life of the world, either generally or at certain periods, as an evil in itself, an essential obstacle to the empire of divine laws, and to the accomplishment of our moral destiny. Hence the follies of ascetics and sectarians; hence, too, theocratic pretensions, pitiable mistakes of the spirit of religion, which has thus entered into hostility with human society, wishing now to flee from it, now to subdue it.