tness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its
power, and its inevitable age, with a long agony, in which the sick
man, guessing his speedy end, clings to life with all the energy of
desperation.

His faith in Catholicism as the only religion disappeared completely;
losing his belief in dogmas he lost also, by inevitable logic, that
belief in the monarchy which had driven him to fight in the mountains,
and he understood clearly now the history of his country without
prejudices of race. The foreign historians showed him the sad fate of
Spain, arrested in the most critical period of her development, when
she was emerging young and strong during the most fertile period of
the Middle Ages, by the fanaticism of priests and inquisitors, and the
folly of some of her kings, who, with utterly inadequate means, wished
to revive the empire of the Caesars, draining the country for this mad
enterprise. Those people who had broken with the Papacy, turning their
backs for ever on Rome, were far happier and more prosperous than that
Spain, which slept like a beggar at the door of the Church.

At this period of his intellectual development Gabriel had an ideal,
and often of an evening he would leave his work to go and listen to
him for an hour at the College of France: this was Ernest Renan;
Gabriel admired him for a double reason, for his talent and for his
history. The great man had also passed through a seminary, and even
now had a priestly look as though he had suffered deeply from the
pressure of the ecclesiastical yoke; he was a rebel, and Gabriel felt
as though he belonged to his own family. "Truly the hammers to destroy
the temple are forged within the temple," and the law fatal to all
religions was being accomplished, when faith vanishes, and the
multitude no longer feel the fervour of early days.

Gabriel was astonished to hear how the teacher could penetrate the
intellectual development of the Hebrew people, which had served as the
basis of Christianity, as he heard him demolish bit by bit the
immense altarpiece, before which humanity had knelt for over nineteen
centuries. The Spanish seminarist revolted against his old faith with
all the impetuosity of his vehement temperament. How could he have
believed all that and have considered it the height of human wisdom!
Certainly Christianity had exercised a beneficial influence at one
period of the infancy of humanity, it had filled men's lives in the
Middle Ages when