attempts would be of no avail.
Science will end by sweeping away all remnants of their ancient
sovereignty, their basilica will crumble beneath the breeze of Truth
without any necessity of raising a finger against it. The trial has been
made, the Gospel as a social code has fallen to pieces, and human wisdom
can only retain account of its moral maxims. Ancient Catholicism is on
all sides crumbling into dust, Catholic Rome is a mere field of ruins
from which the nations turn aside, anxious as they are for a religion
that shall not be a religion of death. In olden times the overburdened
slave, glowing with a new hope and seeking to escape from his gaol,
dreamt of a heaven where in return for his earthly misery he would be
rewarded with eternal enjoyment. But now that science has destroyed that
false idea of a heaven, and shown what dupery lies in reliance on the
morrow of death, the slave, the workman, weary of dying for happiness'
sake, demands that justice and happiness shall find place upon this
earth. Therein lies the new hope--Justice, after eighteen hundred years
of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism
will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed
men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that
religion of torture and nihility! How astonished they will feel on
finding that God was regarded as an executioner, that manhood was
threatened, maimed and chastised, that nature was accounted an enemy,
that life was looked upon as something accursed, and that death alone was
pronounced sweet and liberating! For well-nigh two thousand years the
onward march of mankind has been hampered by the odious idea of tearing
all that is human away from man: his desires, his passions, his free
intelligence, his will and right of action, his whole strength. And how
glorious will be the awakening when such virginity as is now honoured by
the Church is held in derision, when fruitfulness is again recognised as
a virtue, amidst the hosanna of all the freed forces of nature--man's
desires which will be honoured, his passions which will be utilised, his
labour which will be exalted, whilst life is loved and ever and ever
creates love afresh!

A new religion! a new religion! Pierre remembered the cry which had
escaped him at Lourdes, and which he had repeated at Rome in presence of
the collapse of old Catholicism. But he no longer displayed the same
feverish eagerness