ty! 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 as then--a puerile, sickly desire that a new Divinity
should at once reveal himself, an ideal come into being, complete in all
respects, with dogmas and form of worship. The Divine certainly seemed to
be as necessary to man as were bread and water; he had ever fallen back
upon it, hungering for the mysterious, seemingly having no other means of
consolation than that of annihilating himself in the unknown. But who can
say that science will not some day quench the thirst for what lies beyond
us? If the domain of science embraces the acquired truths, it also
embraces, and will ever do so, the truths that remain to be acquired. And
in front of it will there not ever remain a margin for the thirst of
knowledge, for the hypotheses which are but so much ideality? Besides, is
not the yearning for the divine simply a desire to behold the Divinity?
And if science should more and more content the yearning to know all and
be able to do all, will not that yearning be quieted and end by mingling
with the love of acquired truth? A religion grafted on science is the
indicated, certain, inevitable finish of man's long march towards
knowledge. He will come to it at last as to a natural haven, as to peace
in the midst of certainty, after passing every form of ignorance and
terror on his road. And is there not already some