The reply is that it is a mistake to regard all humanity as typified in the person of the recently disabused believer. It has often been made a subject of reproach to free-thinkers that they endeavour to destroy without replacing, but one cannot destroy a religion in the breasts of a people. At some certain moment in its history it falls of its own weight, with the disappearance of the pretended evidences on which it was resting; it does not, properly speaking, die; it ceases simply—becomes extinct. It will cease definitely when it shall have become useless, and there is no obligation to replace what is no longer necessary. Among the masses, intelligence is never far in advance of tradition; one never adopts a new idea until one has by degrees become accustomed to it. It all takes place without violence, or at least without lasting violence; the crisis passes, the wound closes quickly, and leaves no trace behind; the forehead of the masses bears no scar. Progress lies in wait for the moment of least resistance, of least pain. Even revolutions do not succeed except in so far as they are purely beneficial, as they constitute a universally advantageous evolution. For the rest, there is no such thing as a revolution, or a cataclysm, properly so called, in human belief. Each generation adds a doubt to those which existed before in the minds of their parents, and thus faith falls away bit by bit, like the banks of a river worn by the stream; the sentiments which were bound up with the belief go with it, but they are incessantly replaced by others, a new wave sweeps forward to fill the void, and the human soul profits by its losses and grows larger, like the bed of a river. The adaptation of a people to its environment is a beneficent law. It has often been said, and justly, that there is food for the soul as well as food for the body; and the analogy may be pursued by remarking that it is difficult to induce a people to change its national diet. For centuries the inhabitants of Brittany have lived upon imperfectly cooked buckwheat cakes, as they live by their simple faith and infantine superstitions. It may, however, be affirmed, _a priori_, that the day will come when the reign of the buckwheat cake in Brittany will be at an end, or at least will be shared by other, and better prepared, and more nourishing foods; it is equally rational to affirm that the faith of Brittany will some day come to an end, that the somewhat feeble minds of the inhabitants will sooner or later seek nourishment in solider ideas and beliefs, and that the whole of their intellectual life will, by degrees, be transformed and renewed. [Sidenote: The disenchantment that accompanies it temporary.]