ld present itself to
us under conditions totally different from any other book. It may be
said: "You are not so exacting in respect to Herodotus and the poems
of Homer." This is quite true, but then Herodotus and the Homeric
poems do not profess to be inspired books.

With regard to contradictions, for instance, no one whose mind is
free from theological preoccupations can do other than admit the
irreconcilable divergences between the synoptists and the author
of the Fourth Gospel, and between the synoptists Compared with one
another. For us rationalists this is not of much importance; but the
orthodox reasoner, compelled to be of opinion that his book is right
in every particular, finds himself involved in endless subtleties.
Silvestre de Sacy was very much perplexed by the quotations from the
Old Testament which are met with in the New. He found it so difficult,
with his predilection for accuracy in quotations, to reconcile them
that he eventually admitted as a principle that the two Testaments are
both infallible of themselves, but that the New Testament is not so
when it quotes the Old. Only those who have no sort of experience in
the ways of religion will feel any surprise that men of such great
powers of application should have clung to such untenable positions.
In these shipwrecks of a faith upon which you have centred your life,
you cling to the most unlikely means of salvage rather than allow all
you cherish to go to the bottom.

Men of the world who believe that people are brought to a decision in
the choice of their opinions by reasons of sympathy or antipathy will
no doubt be surprised at the train of reasoning which alienated me
from the Christian faith, to which I had so many motives, both of
interest and inclination, for remaining attached. Those who have not
the scientific spirit can scarcely understand that one's opinions are
formed outside of one by a sort of impersonal concretion of which one
is, so to speak, the spectator. In thus letting my course be shaped by
the force of events, I believed myself to be conforming to the rules
of the seventeenth century school, especially to those of Malebranche,
whose first principle is that reason should be contemplated, that man
has no part in its procreation, and that his sole duty is to stand
before the truth, free from all personal bias, ready to let himself be
led whither the balance of demonstration wills it. So far from having
at the outset certain resul