have sprang from
it, may be ascribed much of the irreligion current in France to-day.
The periodical reports on criminality issued by the French Ministers of
Justice since the foundation of the Republic in 1871, supply materials
for a most formidable indictment of that vow of perpetual chastity which
Rome exacts from her clergy. Nowadays it is undoubtedly too late for
Rome to go back upon that vow and thereby transform the whole of her
sacerdotal organisation; but, perhaps, had she done so in past times,
before the spirit of inquiry and free examination came into being, she
might have assured herself many more centuries of supremacy than have
fallen to her lot. But she has ever sought to dissociate the law of the
Divinity from the law of Nature, as though indeed the latter were but
the invention of the Fiend.

Abbe Mouret, M. Zola's hero, finds himself placed between the law of
the Divinity and the law of Nature: and the struggle waged within him by
those two forces is a terrible one. That which training has implanted
in his mind proves the stronger, and, so far as the canons of the Church
can warrant it, he saves his soul. But the problem is not quite frankly
put by M. Zola; for if Abbe Mouret transgresses he does so unwittingly,
at a time when he is unconscious of his priesthood and has no memory of
any vow. When the truth flashes upon him he is horrified with himself,
and forthwith returns to the Church. A further struggle between the
contending forces then certainly ensues, and ends in the final victory
of the Church. But it must at least be said that in the lapses which
occur in real life among the Roman priesthood, the circumstances are
altogether different from those which M. Zola has selected for his
story.

The truth is that in 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret,' betwixt lifelike
glimpses of French rural life, the author transports us to a realm of
poesy and imagination. This is, indeed, so true that he has introduced
into his work all the ideas on which he had based an early unfinished
poem called 'Genesis.' He carries us to an enchanted garden,
the Paradou--a name which one need hardly say is Provencal for
Paradise*--and there Serge Mouret, on recovering from brain fever,
becomes, as it were, a new Adam by the side of a new Eve, the fair and
winsome Albine. All this part of the book, then, is poetry in prose.
The author has remembered the ties which link Rousseau to the realistic
school of fiction, and, as in the