In a thoughtful essay, entitled _The Disenchantment of France_, Mr. F.W. Myers points out the goal towards which "progress" is leading us, through the destruction of those four "illusions" which formerly gave life all its value and dignity,--namely, belief in religion; devotion to the State--whether to the prince or to the people; belief in the eternity and spirituality of human love; belief in man's freedom and imperishable personal unity. "I cannot avoid the conclusion," he says, "that we are bound to be prepared for the worst. Yet by the worst I do not mean any catastrophe of despair, any cosmic suicide, any world-wide unchaining of the brute that lies pent in man. I mean merely the peaceful, progressive, orderly triumph of _l'homme sensuel moyen_; the gradual adaptation of hopes and occupations to a purely terrestrial standard; the calculated pleasures of the cynic who is resolved to be a dupe no more." In other words, if we accept this very temperate and reluctant conclusion, we must confess that the one-sided progress, with whose all-sufficiency we are so thoroughly satisfied, is making straight for the extermination, not only of religion, but of morality in any received sense of the term. But when Mr. Lang, who has no hypothesis of his own as to the origin of belief in God, brings the animistic theory to an _à posteriori_ test, he finds it encumbered with still greater difficulties; for nothing is as, _à priori_, it ought to be. While Mr. Tylor asserts "that no savage tribe of monotheists has ever been known," but that all ascribe the attributes of deity to other beings than the Almighty Creator, it appears in fact that many of the rudest savages "are as monotheistic as some Christians. They have a Supreme Being, and the 'distinctive attributes of deity' are not by them assigned to other beings further than as Christianity assigns them to angels, saints, the devil," &c. Catholics at least will readily understand how hastily and unjustly the charge of polytheism is made by the protestantized mind against any religion which believes in a Heavenly Court as well as in a Heavenly Monarch. "Of the existence of a belief in a Supreme Being" amongst the lowest savages, "there is as good evidence as we possess for any fact in the ethnographic region. It is certain that savages, when first approached by curious travellers and missionaries, have again and again recognized our God in theirs."