In the form of Religious Liberalism, it has often been exemplified in our own country by those who, averse from definite articles of faith, and prone to latitudinarian license, have studiously set themselves to disparage the importance of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, and even to obliterate the distinction between the various forms of Religion, natural and revealed, by representing them all as so many varieties of the same religious sentiment, so many diverse, but not antagonistic, embodiments of the same radical principle. In the writings of Pope, several expressions occur which are easily susceptible of this construction, and which have often been quoted and applied in defence of Religious Liberalism, notwithstanding his explicit disavowal of it in his letter to the younger Racine, prefixed to the collected edition of his works. But on the continent of Europe, Syncretism has been much more fully developed, and fearlessly applied to every department of human thought. Pushed to its ultimate consequences, it obliterates the distinction not only between truth and error, but also between virtue and vice, nay even between Religion and Atheism; and represents them all as constituent parts of a scheme, which is developed under a law of "fatal necessity," but which is described also as a scheme of "optimism." Its range is supposed to be unlimited: for it has been applied to the History of Philosophy, by Cousin, to the theory of the Passions, by Fourier, to the doctrines of Christianity, by Quinet and Michelet, and to the Philosophy of Religion, by Benjamin Constant. The practical result of such speculations is a growing _skepticism_ or _indifference_ in regard to the distinction between truth and error, and a very faint impression of the difference between good and evil.[225] The speculations of Pierre Leroux, the head, if not the founder, of the Humanitarian School, are strongly tinged with this spirit: they amount to a justification of evil, an apotheosis of man.[226]