maladies which benumb and may destroy one, but the former is contagious and is transmitted by contact. We may add that love of expense rarely serves to encourage regular labour: it produces, rather, an appetite for gambling and even for robbery; clever strokes on the stock-exchange amount, in certain cases, to robbery pure and simple. Thence arises a secondary demoralizing influence. Prodigals are necessarily attracted to the more or less shaky forms of financial speculation, by which, absolutely without labour properly so called, more money can be amassed than by labour; the miser, on the contrary, will hesitate, will prefer effort to risk, and his effort will be more beneficial to society. In effect, the only thing that can maintain society in a healthy state is that love of labour for its own sake which is so rarely met with, and which one must endeavour to develop; but this love of intellectual and physical labour is in nowise bound up with religion; it is bound up with a certain broad culture of the mind and heart which render idleness insupportable. [Sidenote: Religion the creature of circumstance.] Similarly with the other moral and social virtues which are alleged to be inseparable from religion. In all times humanity has found a certain average of vice, as of virtue, necessary. Religions themselves have always been obliged to give way before certain prevalent habits and passions. If we had been living at the time of the Reformation, we should have heard Catholic priests maintaining, with all the seriousness in the world, that, but for Catholic dogmas and the authority of the Pope, society would dissolve and perish. Happily experience has proved that these dogmas and that authority are not indispensable to social life; the conscience of mankind has attained its majority and no longer needs the services of a guardian. The day will come, no doubt, when Frenchmen will no more feel an inclination to enter into a house of stone and invoke God to the sound of a hymn than an Englishman or a German experiences to-day an inclination to kneel before a priest and confess to him. _III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion and free-thought?_ [Sidenote: Dependence of Catholicism on power.]