d made him believe
that Spain was the first country in the world, and its people the
noblest and bravest, and that all the other nations were a sort of
wretched mob, created by God to be victims of heresy, and to receive
overwhelming punishment each time that they ventured to interfere with
this privileged country, which, though it eats little and drinks less,
has yet produced the holiest saints and the greatest captains of
Christendom.

When Gabriel could express himself fluently in French and had
contrived to save a few francs for his journey, he went to Paris. A
friendly abbe had procured him employment as corrector of proofs in a
religious library close to Saint Sulpice. In this priestly quarter of
Paris, with its hostels for the clergy and for religious families, as
gloomy as convents, with its shops full of pious images, which flood
the globe with varnished and smiling saints, was accomplished the
great transformation of Gabriel.

This quarter of Saint Sulpice with its streets almost Spanish in their
silence and peacefulness, with the sisters in black veils gliding by
the walls of the seminary, drawn by the sound of the bells, was for
the Spanish seminarist what the road to Damascus had been for the
Apostle. The French Catholicism, cultivated, reasoning and respectful
to human progress, bewildered Gabriel, whose fierce Spanish bigotry
had taught him to despise all profane science. There was only one true
learning in the world, and that was theology. The other sciences were
only toys, only fit to amuse the eternal infancy of humanity. To know
God and to meditate on the greatness of His power, this was the only
serious study to which men could devote themselves; machinery, the
discoveries of the positive sciences, in fact everything which did not
treat of divinity and the future life, was only a bagatelle for the
amusement of fools and people of no faith.

The former seminarist, who from his earliest childhood had despised
all human progress, was stupefied when he perceived how earnestly all
French Catholicism spoke of it. In correcting the proofs of so many
religious works he could not but notice the profound respect which
this despised science inspired in the good French priests, men of such
far superior culture to that of the canons down there. And moreover he
noticed a certain humble shrinking in the representatives of religion
when they came face to face with science--a desire to please, not
to be censoriou