If the finger of God did not so rest, there is no assignable reason why this pyramid--this incubus, as some would call it--which goes back, stone upon stone, to the primitive ages, should not have been overturned, and some system purely atheistical, purely material, purely communistic, substituted for it. But I believe that no democratic organisation, however extended among the masses, will overthrow the established order of things, so long as the possessors of property, the upper classes, are true to the objects for which property was instituted. Considering how much man has effected in the material order, and considering also the varied intellectual faculties with which he is endowed, it strikes one as strange, as something which has to be accounted for, that he has been able to effect so little in the moral order. It is the same whether we regard the action of the intellect upon the individual man, or upon society. And from this latter point of view it is so true, that it is more than doubtful whether those epochs in which man has attained the highest point of intellectual and material civilisation, are not those also in which he has reached the lowest depths of immorality;[80] and in which--having touched the lowest point of corruption--the human intellect is unable to devise any better plan for the government of mankind, than the repression of despotism.[81] [80] "It is, upon the whole, extremely doubtful whether those periods which are the richest in literature, possess the greatest shares, either of moral excellence or of political happiness. We are well aware that the true and happy ages of Roman greatness long preceded that of Roman refinement and Roman authors; and, I fear, there is but too much reason to suppose that in the history of the modern nations we may find many examples of the same kind" (F. Schlegel's "History of Literature," i. 373). See also the account of the corruption of morals in Rome in the Augustan period (Allies' "Form. of Christendom," I. Lect. I.) "It is curious to observe that the more eloquent, polite, and learned the Greeks became, in the same proportion they became the more degraded and corrupt in their national religion" (Godfrey Higgins' "Celtic Druids," 1829, p. 207). [81] "Il n'y a, Messieurs, que deux sortes de repression possibles: l'une intérieure, l'autre extérieure.... Elles sont de telle nature que quand le thermomètre politique est élevé, le thermomètre de la religion est bas, et quand le thermomètre religieux est bas, le thermomètre politique, la repression politique, la tyrannie s'élève. Ceci est une loi de l'humanité, une loi de l'histoire." _Vide_ Disc. de Donoso Cortes (Marq. de Valdegamas), 4th January 1849; in which he pursues this remarkable parallelism throughout history.