The various abstract combinations succeed only in substituting for the Christian mysteries other mysteries still more difficult of comprehension. Pantheism, which, besides, exists in three or four shapes, and which it is the fashion nowadays to ascribe to enlightened intelligences, is the absurdest of Eastern dreams brought back to light by Spinoza[429]. One has but to read the article by the sceptic Bayle[430] on that Jew of Amsterdam. The positive tone in which certain people speak of all these things would be revolting, were it not that it arises from want of study; they take up words which they do not understand, and imagine themselves to be transcendental geniuses. Be assured that Abélard, that St. Bernard, that St. Thomas Aquinas and their fellows brought to bear upon the study of metaphysics a superiority of judgment which we do not approach; that the Saint-Simonian[431], Phalansterian, Fourieristic[432], Humanitarian[433] systems were discovered and practised by the different heresies; that what is placed before us as progress and discovery is so much old lumber hawked about for fifteen centuries in the schools of Greece and the colleges of the Middle Ages. The misfortune is that the first sectaries could not succeed in founding their Neo-Platonic Republic, when Gallienus[434] permitted Plotinus[435] to make the experiment in Campania; later, people made the great mistake of burning the sectaries when they proposed to establish the community of goods and to pronounce prostitution holy, by urging that a woman cannot, without sin, refuse a man who asks of her a transient union in the name of Jesus Christ: all that was needed, said they, to accomplish this union was to annihilate one's soul and deposit it for a moment in the bosom of God. The shock which the _Génie du Christianisme_ gave to men's minds caused the eighteenth century to emerge from the old road and flung it for ever out of its path. People began again, or rather they began for the first time to study the sources of Christianity; on re-reading the Fathers (presuming that they had read them before) they were struck at meeting with so many curious facts, so much philosophical science, so many beauties of style of every kind, so many ideas which, by a more or less perceptible gradation, produced the transition from ancient to modern society: an unique and memorable era of humanity, in which Heaven communicates with earth through the medium of souls set in men of genius.