htful and deliberate sins.

Little by little this tendency to ineffectual quibbling disappeared.
In his mind's eye he saw the panorama of the Church with its
hereditary influence on humanity through the centuries. He imagined it
as imposing and suffering, emphasizing to man the horror of life, the
infelicity of man's destiny; preaching patience, penitence and the
spirit of sacrifice; seeking to heal wounds, while it displayed the
bleeding wounds of Christ; bespeaking divine privileges; promising the
richest part of paradise to the afflicted; exhorting humanity to
suffer and to render to God, like a holocaust, its trials and
offenses, its vicissitudes and pains. Thus the Church grew truly
eloquent, the beneficent mother of the oppressed, the eternal menace
of oppressors and despots.

Here, Des Esseintes was on firm ground. He was thoroughly satisfied
with this admission of social ordure, but he revolted against the
vague hope of remedy in the beyond. Schopenhauer was more true. His
doctrine and that of the Church started from common premises. He, too,
based his system on the vileness of the world; he, too, like the
author of the _Imitation of Christ_, uttered that grievous outcry:
"Truly life on earth is wretched." He, also, preached the nothingness
of life, the advantages of solitude, and warned humanity that no
matter what it does, in whatever direction it may turn, it must remain
wretched, the poor by reason of the sufferings entailed by want, the
rich by reason of the unconquerable weariness engendered by abundance;
but this philosophy promised no universal remedies, did not entice one
with false hopes, so as to minimize the inevitable evils of life.

He did not affirm the revolting conception of original sin, nor did he
feel inclined to argue that it is a beneficent God who protects the
worthless and wicked, rains misfortunes on children, stultifies the
aged and afflicts the innocent. He did not exalt the virtues of a
Providence which has invented that useless, incomprehensible, unjust
and senseless abomination, physical suffering. Far from seeking to
justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and
afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: "If a God has made this
world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness
would rend my heart."

Ah! Schopenhauer alone was right. Compared with these treatises of
spiritual hygiene, of what avail were the evangelical pharmacopoeias?
He did not c