omenon well attested by experience,
is it not the spiritual phenomenon commonly called "the faith of the
peasant"? The strength of belief varies inversely with the amount of
use that a man has made of his reasoning faculties. Simple people and
soldiers belong to the unreasoning class. Those who have marched
through life beneath the banner of instinct are far more ready to
receive the light than minds and hearts overwearied with the world's
sophistries.

Castanier had the southern temperament; he had joined the army as a lad
of sixteen, and had followed the French flag till he was nearly forty
years old. As a common trooper, he had fought day and night, and day
after day, and, as in duty bound, had thought of his horse first, and
of himself afterwards. While he served his military apprenticeship,
therefore, he had but little leisure in which to reflect on the destiny
of man, and when he became an officer he had his men to think of. He
had been swept from battlefield to battlefield, but he had never
thought of what comes after death. A soldier's life does not demand
much thinking. Those who cannot understand the lofty political ends
involved and the interests of nation and nation; who cannot grasp
political schemes as well as plans of campaign and combine the science
of the tactician with that of the administrator, are bound to live in a
state of ignorance; the most boorish peasant in the most backward
district in France is scarcely in a worse case. Such men as these bear
the brunt of war, yield passive obedience to the brain that directs
them, and strike down the men opposed to them as the woodcutter fells
timber in the forest. Violent physical exertion is succeeded by times
of inertia, when they repair the waste. They fight and drink, fight and
eat, fight and sleep, that they may the better deal hard blows; the
powers of the mind are not greatly exercised in this turbulent round of
existence, and the character is as simple as heretofore.

When the men who have shown such energy on the battlefield return to
ordinary civilization, most of those who have not risen to high rank
seem to have acquired no ideas, and to have no aptitude, no capacity,
for grasping new ideas. To the utter amazement of a younger generation,
those who made our armies so glorious and so terrible are as simple as
children, and as slow-witted as a clerk at his worst, and the captain
of a thundering squadron is scarcely fit to keep a merchant's day-bo