But Mr. Abbot is not of the men who are content to rest in mere negation. In a lecture delivered by him in a course under the auspices of the Free-Religious Association, entitled _A Study of Religion_, after much preliminary discourse, he gives with the heading, “The New Conception of Religion,” the following definition of religion: “Religion,” he says, “is the effort of man to perfect himself.”[21] Now, what is the origin of “man’s effort to perfect himself”? “Religion,” he affirms, “appears in its universal aspect as the _decree of Nature_ that her own end shall be achieved. Religion is the inward impulsion of Nature, seconded by the conscious effort of the individual to conform to it,” etc.[22] What Mr. Abbot calls “nature” and “ideal excellence in all directions” is what the common sense of mankind has named God. Mr. Abbot has no objection to the same name; only he insists that the idea of God, which is very proper, should be submitted “to the educated intelligence of the human race.”[23] “It is,” he says, “because I do believe in God that I am willing to submit my belief in him to the sharpest and most searching scrutiny of science.”[24] Now, Mr. Abbot admits that if you once concede the Messianic claim of Christ, “then it is true that Catholicism is itself Christianity in its most perfect form.”[25] He therefore stops virtually in his analysis of religion at the idea of God, and, if he believed in the Divinity of Christ and did not eschew logic, he would have to embrace Catholicity. Mr. Abbot, like many Unitarians, agrees on this point with P. J. Proudhon, but with this difference: the Frenchman recedes a step, and maintains that “outside of Christianity there is no God, no religion, no faith, no theology.... The church believes in God, and believes in God more faithfully and more perfectly than any sect. The church is the purest, most perfect, and most enlightened revelation of the divine Being, and none other understands what is worship. From a religious stand-point the Catholicism of the Latin peoples is the best, the most rational, and the most perfect. Rome, in spite of her repeated and frightful falls, remains the only legitimate church.” Hence Proudhon and those of his school lay it down as a _sine qua non_ that the elimination of the idea of God, and of all obligation to any divine law, is the condition of all true progress. From this we may draw the conclusion that Francis E. Abbot is on the curve line, and, if he follows out his definition of religion to its logical consequences, he will surely land, whatever may be the sweep of his continuous curve, in the bosom of the Catholic Church. There is no escape from this ultimate result, if reason is to rule, except by hastily taking the back track, and starting on the tangent, and eventually plunging with Proudhon into the dark abyss of nihilism. Hence every sagacious straight-line radical cannot but look upon the platform of the editor of the _Index_ as the jumping-off place