But it was not only in the effect on their fellow-beings that the neo-Catholics, the symbolists, and their sympathizers all over the world beheld the results of scientific atheism. Many of these themselves became “frightful examples” of these results. Nordau commits a great mistake in studying the French symbolists as authors and poets. It is as children of their times that they should be studied. He looks upon them as causes of the symbolist movement, whereas we should have regarded them as the indicators of a remarkable stage in the development of our race. It was inevitable that the theories of the scientists should have been accepted more widely in France than in any other civilized country. In the English-speaking countries the Churches and sects had not assumed the same uncompromising attitude with regard to the mediæval doctrines as the Church of Rome. They had gradually receded from one contested point after another and many of their old forms and texts were given a more liberal interpretation. Urged on by the example of the Broad Church, the Congregationalists, and especially by the Unitarians, the clergy and the ministers ceased their opposition to any established scientific facts, though they rejected scientific speculations. The influence of the scientists in the English-speaking countries tended therefore to modernize religion, instead of bringing it into contempt. In Germany, where the people are slow to oppose any authority, and where they are extremely shy of their real religious opinions, scientific atheism simply encouraged the free-thinkers existing there of old and induced a mass of young men to masquerade as free-thinkers who in reality held no opinions at all, and who were destined to become devout in their old age. In Italy and Spain the teachings of the scientists only somewhat strengthened the hands of the Liberals, but produced no effect on the Ultramontanes. In Russia, where the nobility and the middle classes had for a long time been free-thinkers, or perhaps non-thinkers, in regard to religious questions, the religion of humanity affected only that portion of the people which was already under the influence of Nihilism, and tended to render them more reckless.