doubt yielded to the universal deluge and eubmitted to the one or the other of the new religions. But the propagators and sustainers of the various religions had their frailties and temptations, and it is to the poete who advocated their respective causes that we owe the ‘moral safety of the people. The poet while accepting his select faith always looked to his own higher ideal as his guide to his faith, and he brandished his ideal triumphantly before the masses—the masses that fol- lowed him in accepting the faith and loved the faith ‘because he made them love it, and they could not be -quite divorced from the ideal which made them love the - poet and his faith. Nor, on the other hand, was it aught but sheer danger for the leaders of religions to discard their poets ; and, nolens volens, the heads of sects were bound to come up as,far as they could to the ideals which the poets chose to make them repre- sent. Itisin this way that the later-day poets con- tributed to preserve society from unmitigated feti- -chism and to save the moral safety of both Prophet and People from ruin and anarchy.
Nor is it to be supposed for a moment that the voluptuous song, which we now and then find -diversifying the field of poetry, must of necessity make the mind vicious. Much must depend upon the mood in which such matter is read. France is one of those countries which is charged with having
