I often meet, near my home, a missionary with a black beard, a hard, sharp eye, lit sometimes by a mystic gleam. He seems to maintain a correspondence with the four corners of the world; assuredly he works and works precisely at building up what I am endeavouring to pull down. And must our opposite strivings therefore be regarded as hostile? Why so? Are we not both brothers and humble collaborators in the work of humanity? To convert primitive peoples to Christian dogma and to deliver those who have arrived at a higher stage of civilization from a positive and dogmatic faith, are two tasks which, far from excluding each other, complete each other. Missionaries and freethinkers cultivate different plants, in different places, but at bottom both are labouring to make the field of humanity more fertile. It is said that John Huss, when tied to the stake at Constance, wore a smile of supreme joy when he perceived a peasant in the crowd, bringing straw from the roof of his hut to light the fire: _Sancta simplicitas!_ The martyr recognized in this man a brother in sincerity; he was glad to find himself in the presence of a disinterested conviction. We are no longer in the times of John Huss, of Bruno, of Servetius, of St. Justin, or of Socrates; it constitutes a reason the more for showing ourselves tolerant, and sympathetic even, toward those whom we regard as being in error, provided that the error be sincere. There is an anti-religious fanaticism which is almost as dangerous as religious fanaticism. Erasmus compares humanity to a drunken man seated on a horse and lurching first to the right and then to the left. The enemies of religion have often committed the mistake of despising their adversaries; it is the worst of faults. There is a power of elasticity in human beliefs which causes their resistance to increase in proportion to the compression which is exerted upon them. Formerly, when a city was attacked by some scourge, the first care of the notable inhabitants, of the chiefs of the city, was to order public prayers; to-day the practical means of battling with epidemics and other scourges are better known, but nevertheless, in 1885, when there was cholera in Marseilles the municipal council devoted its attention almost singly to removing the religious mottoes from the walls of the public schools; it is a remarkable example of what one may call a counter-superstition. Thus the two species of fanaticism, religious and anti-religious, may equally distract the timid from the employment of scientific means against natural evils; an employment which is after all, _par excellence_, the business of man; these two kinds of fanaticism are paralyso-motors in the great body of humanity.