With the decay of the dogmatic religion of Christendom which is supremely stated in the faith of the Roman Catholic Church, there must follow the non-religion of the future, which may well preserve, he points out, all that is pure in the religious sentiment and carry with it an admiration for the cosmos and for the infinite powers which are there displayed. It will be a search for, and a belief in, an ideal not only individual, but social and even cosmic, which shall pass the limits of actual reality. Hence it appears that “non-religion” or “a-religion,” which is for Guyau simply “the negation of all dogma, of all traditional and supernatural authority, of all revelation, of all miracle, of all myth, of all rite erected into a duty,” is most certainly not a synonym for irreligion or impiety, nor does it involve any contempt for the moral and metaphysical doctrines expressed by the ancient religions of the world. The non-religious man in Guyau’s sense of the term is simply the man without a religion, as he has defined it above, and he may quite well admire and sympathise with the great founders of religion, not only in that they were thinkers, metaphysicians, moralists and philanthropists, but in that they were reformers of established belief, more or less avowed enemies of religious authority and of every affirmation laid down by an ecclesiastical body in order to bind the intellectual freedom of individuals. Guyau’s remarks in this connection agree with the tone in which Renan spoke of his leaving the Church because of a feeling of respect and loyalty to its Founder. Guyau points out that there exists in the bosom of every great religion a dissolving force—namely, the very force which in the beginning served to constitute it and to establish its triumphant revolt over its predecessor. That force is the absolute right of private judgment, the free factor of the personal conscience, which no external authority can succeed, ultimately, in coercing or silencing. The Roman Church, and almost every other organised branch of the Christian religion, forgets, when faced with a spirit which will not conform, that it is precisely to this spirit that it owes its own foundation and also the best years of its existence. Guyau has little difficulty in pressing the conclusions which follow from the recognition of this vital point.