been the most durable, and the wisest." Plutarch affirms (contra Colotes) 'that it is easier to build a city in the air than to establish society without a belief in the gods.' Rousseau, in his Social Contract, Book iv., ch. viii., observes, 'that a State was never established without religion as a foundation.' Voltaire says, in his Treatise on Toleration, ch. xx., 'that religion is, on all accounts, necessary wherever society exists.' All the legislation of the ancients rests upon a fear of gods. Polybius declares that this holy fear is always more requisite in a free people than in others. That Rome might be the eternal city, Numa made it the holy city. Among the nations of antiquity the Roman was the greatest, precisely because it was the most religious. Cesar having one day uttered certain words, in open Senate, against the existence of the gods, Cato and Cicero arose from their seats and accused the irreverent youth of having spoken words fatal to the Republic. It is related of Fabricius, a Roman captain, that having heard the philosopher Cineas ridicule the Divinity in presence of Pyrrhus, he pronounced these memorable words: 'May it please the gods, that our enemies follow this doctrine when they make war against the Republic.' 'The decline of faith that produces the decline of truth does not necessarily cripple, but certainly misleads the human mind. God, who is both compassionate and just, denies truth to guilty souls, but does not deprive them of life. He condemns them to error, but not to death. All an evidence of this, every one has witnessed those periods of prodigious incredulity and of highest culture that have shown in history with a phosphorescent light, leaving more of a burning than a luminous track behind them. If we carefully contemplate these ages, we shall see that their splendor is only the inflamed glare or the lightning's flash. It is evident that their brightness is the sudden explosion of their obscure but combustible materials, rather than the calm light proceeding from purest regions, and serenely spread over heaven's vault by the divine pencil of the sovereign painter. "What is here said of ages may also be said of men. The absence or the possession of faith, the denial of God or the abandonment of truth, neither gives them understanding nor deprives them of it. That of the unbeliever may be of the highest order, and that of the believer very limited; but the greatness of the first is that of an abyss, while the second has the holiness of a tabernacle. In the first dwells error, in the second truth. In the abyss with error is death, in the tabernacle with truth is life. Consequently there can be no hope whatever for those communities that renounce the austere worship of truth for the idolatry of the intellect. Sophisms produce revolutions and sophists are succeeded by hangmen.