The French symbolists have created greater sympathy with their religious views than might have been expected in our rational times because, unlike the Catholic clergy of the past, they treat as symbols what before were considered as representations of actual facts. They are not orthodox; and if the Church of Rome is anxious, as it seems to be, to turn this neo-Catholicism into a means of resuming its influence, it can only do so by enormously modernizing its fundamental ideas. It will be interesting to see whether the Church of Rome will accept the symbolists as co-operators, or finally spurn them as heretics. What especially rouses the animosity of Nordau against the symbolists is the fact that the new movement is based on the supposition that science is bankrupt, or, in other words, that it has failed in all its promises to humanity; that it has usurped the throne of religion under false pretences; and that its incapacity to supplant religion has been demonstrated by the latest scientific discoveries. According to the idea underlying the French symbolist movement, science has during the present century aimed at the destruction of religion, and has caused religion to be neglected, discredited, and scorned. Such a movement founded on such premises and aiming at such aims must be of the greatest interest to any man who watches attentively the development of our race. To study its true cause, its real nature, and its real aims should be the desire of every earnest investigator; and if Nordau falls back on obloquy, indelicate insinuations, and blunt accusations, after the fashion of the militant _literati_ of the past, the reason of his animosity is easily explained. Nordau, like many scientists before him and with him, has taken sides in the absurd fight—the _querelle allemande_—between science and religion, which has done so much to discredit both. To the unprejudiced observer, any scientist who joins in the fray is induced to do so by his inability to distinguish between religion and church, and consequently to realize that the whole progress of science during the present century has had the result, amongst many others, of justifying such an attitude of mind towards God, the original cause, universal energy, or whatever scientists choose to call it, which religion implies. Whoever distinguishes between church and religion will at once understand that an ascendency of religious views throughout the world may be perfectly compatible with the decay of sectarian dogmas, and that therefore many phenomena which appear to indicate the decay of religious views—such as church-going, for example—may in reality mean a deeper religious life. If we take a comprehensive view of that progress in religious views which has been accelerated by science, we shall find that church-going, the rosary, and the images of the saints indicate the preliminary stages of a religious evolution which in its later development requires truer expressions.