the new certainties, by taking refuge in the
assertion that they are simply symbolical! And what an extraordinary
attitude is that of the Catholic Church, expressly forbidding all those
who may discover a truth contrary to the sacred writings to pronounce
upon it in definitive fashion, and ordering them to await events in the
conviction that this truth will some day be proved an error! Only the
Pope, says the Church, is infallible; Science is fallible, her constant
groping is exploited against her, and divines remain on the watch
striving to make it appear that her discoveries of to-day are in
contradiction with her discoveries of yesterday. What do her sacrilegious
assertions, what do her certainties rending dogma asunder, matter to a
Catholic since it is certain that at the end of time, she, Science, will
again join Faith, and become the latter's very humble slave! Voluntary
blindness and impudent denial of things as evident as the sunlight, can
no further go. But all the same the insignificant little book, the manual
of truth travels on continuing its work, destroying error and building up
the new world, even as the infinitesimal agents of life built up our
present continents.

In the sudden great enlightenment which had come on him Pierre at last
felt himself upon firm ground. Has Science ever retreated? It is
Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be
forced to retreat. Never does Science stop, step by step she wrests truth
from error, and to say that she is bankrupt because she cannot explain
the world in one word and at one effort, is pure and simple nonsense. If
she leaves, and no doubt will always leave a smaller and smaller domain
to mystery, and if supposition may always strive to explain that mystery,
it is none the less certain that she ruins, and with each successive hour
will add to the ruin of the ancient hypotheses, those which crumble away
before the acquired truths. And Catholicism is in the position of those
ancient hypotheses, and will be in it yet more thoroughly to-morrow. Like
all religions it is, at the bottom, but an explanation of the world, a
superior social and political code, intended to bring about the greatest
possible sum of peace and happiness on earth. This code which embraces
the universality of things thenceforth becomes human, and mortal like
everything that is human. One cannot put it on one side and say that it
exists on one side by itself, whilst Scienc