"Art is but praise of life, and it is only through the arts that we can praise life. Life is a rose that withers in the iron fist of dogma, and it was France that forced open the deadly fingers of the Ecclesiastic and allowed the rose to bloom again." Descartes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Merimee, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant are all agnostics. The most important Christians are Pascal, Racine, and Corneille, who wrote mere imitations of the Greek drama without any criticism of life, and Verlaine, who embraced the Church in an ecstasy more sensuous than religious. In Germany there are Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche--no Catholics and mainly agnostic. In Russia we find the utterly unmoral Turgenev and Tolstoy, who professed to be a Christian, but, as Mr. Moore points out, did not believe in the Resurrection of the Body. In Italy the main figure since the Reformation is an artist of today, the pagan D'Annunzio. In Spain there is one great Catholic work, _Don Quixote_, but it is completely unethical. Among the Scandinavians, Ibsen, Bjornson, and Strindberg are agnostics. In England the main evidence for the defence is found in Pope, who called himself a Christian, but wrote _The Essay on Man_, and Cardinal Newman, who, according to Carlyle, had a brain like a half-grown rabbit. In America there are Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, and Whitman--Protestant and agnostic. The reason for all this has been explained by Mr. Moore again and again. It lies in the fact that the Church has always preferred the obedient and poor in spirit to the courageous and the wise. Religion is strongest among ignorant and weak-minded people, and as far back as the book of Genesis we read of God's anger at the man and woman who ate of the forbidden fruit. "The two great enemies of religion are the desire to live and the desire to know," and the whole tendency of art is to increase and strengthen these desires. Another thing for which the Church is responsible is the present attitude toward love. Mr. Moore writes with pride of "the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead." He insists with Gautier that earth is as beautiful as heaven.