But is not religion a safeguard of popular morality? It is true that immorality and crime are habitually conceived as associated with non-religion, and as products of it. Criminologists, however, have demonstrated that no proposition could be less tenable. If one considers the mass of the delinquents in any country, one will find that irreligion among them is an exception, and a rare exception. In unusually religious countries like England delinquents are not less numerous, and the average of belief among them is higher; the greater number, Mayhew says, profess to believe in the Bible. In France, where non-religion is so common, it is natural that it should also be common among the criminal classes, but it is far from being the rule; it is most frequent among the leaders, the organizers of crime, those, in effect, who rise above the mass of their fellows, like Mandrin in the last century, La Pommerais, Lacenaire. If sociologists find themselves obliged to attribute a positive antisocial bias to certain criminals, it is not surprising that they should recognize in a number of them an amount of instruction and a degree of talent amply sufficient to disembarrass them of the superstitious beliefs of the multitude, which are shared by their companions in crime. Neither their talents nor their culture have sufficed absolutely to check their evil disposition, but certainly they have not been responsible for it. Criminologists cite a number of facts which go to prove that the most minute and sincere practice of religion may go along with the greatest crimes. Despine relates that Bourse had scarcely finished a robbery and a homicide, before he went to kneel and take part in a church service. G., a courtesan, as she set fire to her lover’s house, cried: “God and the ever blessed Virgin do the rest!” The wife of Parency, while her husband was killing an old man as a preliminary to robbery, was praying God for her husband’s success. It is well known how religious the Marquise of Brinvilliers was; her very condemnation was facilitated by the fact of her having written with her own hands a secret confession of her sins in which she made mention, along with parricides, fratricides, arsons, and poisonings without number, of the list of the number of times that she had been remiss or negligent in confession.[76] Religion is no more responsible for all these crimes than non-religion is; the higher elements of both are equally debarred of entrance into the brain of a criminal. Although the moral sense and religious sentiment are in origin distinct, they act and react incessantly upon each other. It may be announced, as a law, that no one whose moral sense is obliterated can be capable of experiencing genuine religious sentiment in all its purity, though such a person may well be more than usually apt to attach a value to the superstitious forms of a cult. The religious sentiment, at its height, always rests upon a