ly masters had fashioned me.

In accordance with the general rule I went, after completing my
rhetoric at Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet, to Issy, the country
branch of the St. Sulpice seminary. Thus I left M. Dupanloup for an
establishment in which the discipline was diametrically opposed to
that of Saint-Nicholas. The first thing which I was taught at St.
Sulpice was to regard as childish nonsense the very things which M.
Dupanloup had told me to prize the most. What, I was taught, could
be simpler? If Christianity is a revealed truth, should not the chief
occupation of the Christian be the study of that revelation, in other
words of theology? Theology and the study of the Bible absorbed my
whole time, and furnished me with the true reasons for believing in
Christianity and for not adhering to it. For four years a terrible
struggle went on within me, until at last the phrase, which I had long
put away from me as a temptation of the devil, "It is not true," would
not be denied. In describing this inward combat and the Seminary of
St. Sulpice itself, which is further removed from the present age than
if encircled by thousands of leagues of solitude, I will endeavour
also to show how I arose from the direct study of Christianity,
undertaken in the most serious spirit, without sufficient faith to be
a sincere priest, and yet with too much respect for it to permit of my
trifling with faiths so worthy of that respect.

[Footnote 1: A very graphic description of it has been given by
M. Adolphe Morillon in his _Souvenirs de Saint-Nicolas_. Paris.
Licoffre.]

[Footnote 2: See the excellent memoir by M. Fonlon (now Archbishop of
Besancon) upon Abbe Richard.]

THE ISSY SEMINARY.

PART I.

The Petty Seminary of Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet had no
philosophical course, philosophy being, in accordance with the
division of ecclesiastical studies, reserved for the great seminary.
After having finished my classical education in the establishment so
ably directed by M. Dupanloup, I was, with the students in my class,
passed into the great seminary, which is set apart for an exclusively
ecclesiastical course of teaching. The grand seminary for the diocese
of Paris is St. Sulpice, which consists of two houses, one in
Paris and the other at Issy, where the students devote two years to
philosophy. These two seminaries form, in reality, one. The one is the
outcome of the other, and they are both conjoined at certain times;