there was little to think of beyond religion, and, in
a land desolated by strife, there was no other refuge for intellectual
thought but the cathedral in the towns and the monastery in the
country. "The fairs--the assemblies for business and pleasure," said
the master, "were religious feasts; the scenic representations were
mysteries, the journeys were pilgrimages and the wars crusades." After
this the ways of life divided--religious life took one way and human
life the other. Art placed nature above the ideal, and men thought
more of earth than of heaven. Reason was born, and every advance that
it made was one step backward for faith, and at last the time arrived
when the clear-sighted, those who were anxious about the future, began
to ask themselves what the new belief was likely to be which would
replace the moribund religion. Luna had no doubts on the point--it was
science, and science alone, which could fill the vacuum caused by that
religion now dead for ever.

Influenced by the Hellenism of his master, which he assimilated
easily, being accustomed to daily intercourse with the Greek authors,
he dreamed that the humanity of the future would be an immense Athens,
an artistic and learned democracy governed by great thinkers, with
no strifes but those of the mind, with no ambition but that of
cultivating the intellect, of gentle manners, and devoted to the joys
of the mind and the culture of reason.

Of all his old beliefs, Gabriel only retained that of a creative
God from a certain superstitious scruple. His ideas were rather
disconcerted by astronomy, which he had taken up with an almost
childish eagerness, attracted by the charm of the marvellous.
That infinite space in which in olden days legions of angels had
manoeuvred, and which had served the Virgin as a pathway in her
terrestrial descents, he suddenly found to be peopled with thousands
of millions of worlds, and the more powerful men's instruments became
the more numerous they seemed to be, the distances being infinitely
prolonged to immensities that were inconceivable. Bodies were
attracted to one another travelling in space at the rate of millions
of miles a minute, and all this cloud of worlds revolved without ever
passing twice over the same spot in this immensity of silence, in
which fresh stars, and again others and others, were continually being
discovered as the instruments of observation became more perfect.

This God of Gabriel's having lost th