Subsidence of thought, benumbment of the spirit of liberty, love of routine, of blind tradition, of passive obedience, of everything, in a word, which is directly opposed to the spirit of modern science are the results of a too exclusively clerical education. These dangers are being more and more distinctly felt, especially in France—perhaps too much so. We go the length of demanding that religious education shall be suppressed and that immediately, as being hostile to liberty and to progress. An irresistible movement has begun toward lay education, a movement to which Catholics must some day or other adjust themselves. But it should be done slowly, transition should not be pushed too rapidly. To suppress at a blow the whole clergy who once had complete control of the national education, and still have charge of some portion of it, ought not to be the aim of free-thinkers; the clergy will suppress themselves if they are but given time; they will simply become extinct. At bottom it is not a bad thing that fifty-five thousand people should be or appear to be occupied with something else than their personal wants. No doubt one never lives completely up to one’s ideal, and the ideal of disinterestedness that the priest proposes to himself is rarely realized; still it is good that a certain number of men here below should labour at a task which is above their strength; so many others labour at tasks only which are beneath them. [Sidenote: A religion at its best only in competition.] It must be confessed, however, that no religion is at its best in a country in which it reigns supreme; really to estimate it, one must see it struggling for supremacy against some rival faith, Catholic against Protestant, for example. Under such circumstances the priest and the pastor in a sense run a race with each other, compete with each other in activity and intelligence. One may see the results in the Dauphiné, in Alsace, and in a number of foreign countries. The zeal of the priest profits immensely by some such struggle for existence on the part of the religion to which he belongs; whoever does the most good, gives the best advice, the best education, to the children in his charge, wins a victory for his faith. The result, which is easy to foresee, is that a mixed population of Protestants and Catholics is better instructed, more enlightened, is possessed of a higher morality than many other countries wholly Catholic. [Sidenote: Proposed reform in Catholic countries.]