will be schisms, more, perhaps, than ever before, but
the true Catholic will be inflexible in the declaration: "If I
must abandon my past, I shall abandon the whole; for I believe in
everything upon the principle of infallibility, and this principle
is as much affected by one small concession as by ten thousand large
ones." For the Catholic Church to admit that Daniel was an apocryphal
person of the time of the Maccabaei, would be to admit that she
had made a mistake; if she was mistaken in that, she may have been
mistaken in others, and she is no longer divinely inspired.

I do not, therefore, in any way regret having been brought into
contact, for my religious education, with sincere teachers, who would
have scrupulously avoided letting me labour under any illusion as to
what a Catholic is required to admit. The Catholicism which was taught
me is not the insipid compromise, suitable only for laymen, which has
led to so many misunderstandings in the present day. My Catholicism
was that of Scripture, of the councils, and of the theologians.
This Catholicism I loved, and I still respect it; having found it
inadmissible, I separated myself from it. This is a straightforward
course, but what is not straightforward is to pretend ignorance of
the engagement contracted, and to become the apologist of things
concerning which one is ignorant. I have never lent myself to
a falsehood of this description, and I have looked upon it as
disrespectful to the faith to practise deceit with it. It is no fault
of mine if my masters taught me logic, and by their uncompromising
arguments made my mind as trenchant as a blade of steel. I took
what was taught me--scholasticism, syllogistic rules, theology, and
Hebrew--in earnest; I was an apt student; I am not to be numbered with
the lost for that.

THE ST. SULPICE SEMINARY.

PART IV.

Such were these two years of inward labour, which I cannot compare to
anything better than a violent attack of encephalitis, during which
all my other functions of life were suspended. With a certain amount
of Hebraic pedantry, I called this crisis in my life Naphtali,[1]
and I often repeated to myself the Hebrew saying: "_Napktoule elohim
niphtali_ (I have fought the fight of God)." My inward feelings were
not changed, but each day a stitch in the tissue of my faith was
broken; the immense amount of work which I had in hand prevented
me from drawing the conclusion. My Hebrew lecture absorbed my wh