Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/160

150 nevertheless represents a version much nearer to the common source. Yet the contrary opinion prevails among the majority of orthodox students, because they take as their point of departure the necessary infallibility and priority of Genesis.

Sometimes the prejudice is frankly avowed. In January, 1680, the Abbé de Broglie began at the Catholic Institute of Paris a course on the history of non-Christian religions, and the "Polybiblion" of the next month gave the following summary of his opening lecture: "he proposes to show from the history of the most widely spread false cults that they are not to be compared with Christianity, and, coming down from generalities to a more special study, he will make a brilliant demonstration of the superiority of our religion." This is not history, but apologetics.

We very frequently meet with an inverse kind of apologetics among the adversaries of religious ideas. In fact, the anti-religious prejudice, which rests, like the religious prejudice, on an exclusive view of things, is a direct result of dogmatic intolerance. If one is in the habit of regarding the ideas of others as a heap of superstitions and impostures, it is easy to conceive that, when he loses faith in the supernatural origin of beliefs, he will confound all the religions of the earth and the religious sentiment itself in a contempt that will henceforth recognize no exception.

Some think that to occupy themselves with religions is to waste time; as if religious questions did not figure among the vital questions of our epoch. "When I published the translation of the 'Life of Jesus,' by Strauss," writes Littré, "the objection was made, from the point of view of the freethinker and revolutionist, that I was undertaking a wholly useless work, and one that was out of date, and that the eighteenth century had performed, better than all the Strausses in the world, all the work of demolition that was needed. Yes, the negative work, but not the positive work. And this is no subtile distinction that stops short of going to the bottom of things. Let us consider the aberrations that haunted the mind of the eighteenth century on the subject of religions. It was impossible for it to comprehend anything of their origin, of the part they played, or of their life. They were, according to some, inventions of crafty men who worked upon popular credulity and thereby gained power and wealth. According to others, nothing could be seen in them but periods of ignorance and superstition which it was impossible sufficiently to