nderstanding the full extent of the evil,
warned him with his usual good sense.

"You are turning the heads of these poor men, with the things you
tell them. Be careful; they are very well meaning, but they are very
ignorant. And having been ignorant all their lives, it is dangerous to
turn such men into sages at one blow. It is as if I, being accustomed
to the homely stew, were taken to-day to His Eminence's table. I
should gorge myself and drink too much; at night I should have a
colic, and should probably hop the twig."

Gabriel acknowledged the truth of this prudent advice, but he could
not draw back--he was driven on by the affection of his disciples and
his own ardour as propagandist. It was a great delight to him to see
the wonder in those virgin minds, entering tumultuously into the
luminous palaces constructed by human thought during the last century.

The description of the future of humanity inflamed all Luna's ardour.
He spoke of the happiness of men, after a revolutionary crisis which
would change all the organisation of humanity with mystic rapture,
like a Christian preacher describing heaven.

"Man ought to seek happiness solely in this world, for after death
there only existed the infinite life of matter with its endless
combinations, but the human being was effaced as entirely as a plant
or an animal--he fell into oblivion when he sank into the tomb.
Immortality of the soul was one of the illusions of human pride worked
up by religions, who laid their foundations on this lie. It was
only in this life that man could find heaven. Everyone embarked on
immensity in the same ship, the earth. We were all comrades in our
dangers and our struggles, and we ought to look upon one another
as brothers seeking the common welfare. And what about the unequal
distribution of goods, the division of classes, the ability to work,
and, above all, the struggle for existence, that the philosophers and
poets of the oppressing classes paint as an indispensable condition of
progress? Communism is the holiest aspiration of humanity, the
divine dream of man since he began to think in the first dawn of
civilisation. Religions had endeavoured to establish it, but religion
had been shipwrecked and was moribund, and only science could enforce
it in the future. They must stop on the way they were going, as
humanity was marching on the road to perdition, therefore it was
necessary to return to the point of departure. The first man