Every illogical position being in its nature unstable, the very inconsequence of a religion obliges it to a perpetual evolution in the direction of an ultimate non-religion, which it approaches incessantly by almost insensible steps. The Protestant knows nothing of the ordeal of a Catholic obliged to accept everything or to reject everything; he knows nothing of prodigious revolutions and subjective _coups d’état_; he possesses instinctively the art of transition, his _credo_ is elastic. There are so many different creeds, each a little more thorough-going than the last, that he may pass through, that he has time to habituate his spirit to the truth before being obliged to profess it in its simplicity. Protestantism is the only religion, in the Occident at least, in which it is possible for one to become an atheist unawares and without having done one’s self the shadow of a violence in the process: the subjective theism of Mr. Moncure Conway, for example, or any such ultra-liberal Unitarian is so near a neighbour to ideal atheism that really the two cannot be told apart, and yet the Unitarians, who as a matter of fact are often simply free-thinkers, hold, so to speak, that they still believe. The truth is that an affectionate faith long retains its charm, even after one is persuaded that it is an error and dead in one; one caresses the lifeless illusions and cannot bring one’s self altogether to abandon them, as in the land of the Slavs it is the custom to kiss the pale face of the dead in the open coffin before throwing upon it the handful of earth which severs definitely the last visible bonds of love. [Sidenote: Exemplified in the case of Brahmanism and Buddhism.]