It is true, vitality and reactive energy might have survived such a
process; but that vitality would have shown itself just as it has in
France--in struggles and convulsions. The frequent revolutions of
France are not a thing to be sneered at; they are not evidences of
fickleness, but of constancy; they are, in fact, a prolonged struggle
for liberty, in which there occur periods of defeat, but in which,
after every interval of repose, the strife is renewed. Their great
difficulty has been, that the destruction of the reformed church in
France took out of the country entirely that element of religious
rationalism which is at once conservative and progressive.
There are three forces which operate in society: that of blind faith,
of reverent religious freedom, and of irreverent scepticism. Now,
since the human mind is so made that it must have religion, when this
middle element of reasonable religious freedom is withdrawn, society
vibrates, like a pendulum, between scepticism and superstition; the
extreme of superstition reacting to scepticism, and then the
barrenness of scepticism reacting again into superstition.
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