represent among certain nations the spirit of caste and intolerance, and consequently of jealousy and enmity, whereas non-religion has come to be the recognized champion of social equality, of tolerance, and of fraternity. Behind God, rightly or wrongly, as behind their natural defender, the partisans of the old order of things, of privilege and hereditary enmities, have ranged themselves; in the breast of the faithful a mystical love for God corresponds to-day as in other days to an anathema and malediction on mankind. It was long ago remarked that those whose blessing is most fluent can also show themselves at need the most fluent to curse; the most mystical are the most violent. Nothing can equal the violence of the gentle Jesus himself when he is speaking of the Pharisees, whose doctrines possessed so close an analogy to his own. Whoever believes himself to have felt the breath of God upon his forehead becomes bitter and obstinate in his relations with mere men; he is no longer one of them. So that the notion of the divine, of the superhuman tends toward that of the antinatural and antihuman. [Sidenote: And also love of family.] The aim of progress in modern societies is to domesticate peace within their limits as well as without, to suppress mysticism, and to concentrate upon the real universe, present or to come, the whole body of our affections; to bind our hearts together in so intimate a union that they shall be sufficient unto themselves and unto each other, and that the human world, magnified by the eyes of love, may gather to itself the totality of things. In the first place the love of family, which scarcely existed at all in ancient times, and which in the Middle Ages was almost entirely absorbed by the conception of authority and of subordination, can scarcely be said to have acquired before our days a considerable hold on human life. It is only since the eighteenth century and the spread of the theory of equality that the father of a family, in especial in France, has ceased to consider himself as a sort of irresponsible sovereign, and begun to treat his wife in some sort as his equal and to exercise over his children no more than the minimum of possible authority. Whenever women shall receive an education almost equivalent to that given to men, the moral equality between them and men will have been consecrated, and as love is always more complete and more durable between beings who consider each other as morally equal, it follows that the love of family will increase, will draw to itself a greater proportion of the desires and aspirations of the individual. In positive opposition to religion, which has undertaken to combat the love of woman by restraining it within narrow limits, the love of woman has attained little by little an intensity that it never possessed in ancient times: it suffices to read our poets to become convinced of it, and it will continue to increase with the intellectual development