It would be better for the world to go off in smoke, so to speak; to become sublimated like the corpses which the worshippers of the sun used to expose to its rays, to be converted, as far as possible, into vapour. [Sidenote: Love of God on the decline.] Excess destroys itself. If pleasure ends in disgust, mysticism possesses also its seamy side in a certain disenchantment with God himself, in a certain home-sickness for unknown joys, in that sadness peculiar to the cloister for which Christians were obliged to invent a new name, in the Latin language, to designate—_acedia_. When in the Middle Ages all one’s preoccupations and affections were turned toward heaven, human tenderness was impoverished to precisely that extent. The intellectual and moral evolution of our days has moved in a contrary direction; love of God is on the decline. Love of mankind, on the contrary, and love of living beings in general, is on the increase. A sort of substitution of the one for the other is taking place. Does it not seem as if earth’s turn had come, and that much of the force previously spent in futile adoration, devoted toward the clouds, is being more and more practically employed in the service of humanity? [Sidenote: Love of man to take its place.] Formerly, ideas of human fraternity and loving equality were promoted in especial by the Christians. The explanation is simple: God was conceived by them as an actual father, a _genitor_; men seemed to the early Christians all of one family, having a common ancestor. So that divine love and human love were regarded by them as inseparably bound up with each other. It is to be added that Christianity, which made its way into the world through the lower classes of society, had everything to gain by giving prominence to notions of fraternity and equality; it was by this means among others that it conciliated the masses, who were for a long time its main support. But from the moment it found itself able to rely upon the higher classes of society, how quickly it changed its language is well known, and at the present moment the position of Christianity is precisely opposite to that which it occupied in the ancient world. Ardent advocates of the ideas of fraternity are often adversaries of religion, are often free-thinkers, sometimes decided atheists. The system of thought which founded the love of men for each other upon a community of origin is almost universally rejected. Social doctrines, which in former times were so often based upon the element of socialism in the New Testament, are nowadays being formed and inculcated in complete independence of religious faith and often in positive antagonism to any religious faith whatever. Religion sometimes presents itself as an additional obstacle, simply, to the brotherhood of man, in that it creates more stubborn divisions among them than differences of class or even of language. By an inevitable evolution religion has to-day come to