Never had unbelievers a fairer chance for rooting out Christianity by political and social revolutions, than in the eighteenth century. The laugh was everywhere against religion and the clergy, a decided materialistic and infidel philosophy pervaded literature, possessed the schools, ruled in the courts, and domineered over thought and intellect. There was lukewarmness in the religious, there were scandals among the clergy, there were abuses in the state, and therefore an imperious call for reform. The reformers directed all their movements against religion, and their means were democratic and social revolution. They were strong, they were overwhelming in their power. At their bidding, down went throne and altar, and in ten years the religion they had abolished was reëstablished, the churches they had closed were reopened at the order of the soldier they had made their chief, and for democracy in the state they had an incipient Cæsarism, which, two years later, became a fully developed and perfect Cæsarism. The same result had followed our own movement. In January, 1850, religion was far more vigorous in Europe, than in January, 1840, and democracy at a far greater discount. It was idle, then, to hope either to destroy political and social authority in the name of absolute unbelief and irreligion, or to root out Christianity by political and social movements. Christianity could be eradicated only by means of a rival religion, and a religion which could appeal to a supernatural origin, and sustain itself by prodigies, or what the vulgar would regard as miracles. I had suspected this from the beginning, and resolved now, that instead of working with the purely secular passions of men, I would make my appeal to their religiosity. Mahomet, in the seventh century, had done this admirably for his time and the East, but had incautiously fixed his superstition in the Koran, and made it unalterable, and therefore incapable of adapting itself to the new face which things might assume in the vicissitude of events, the development of society, and the progress of the race. Swedenborg had done better, and so had Joe Smith, but neither had sufficiently provided for the progressiveness of the race, or with sufficient explicitness consecrated the principle of innovation and change, and both had retained too many conceptions taken from the old religion. Yet Swedenborg was to be taken as our starting point, and we were only to avoid his mistakes, the principal of which was a too strict and rigid church organization.