them to be eternal. The faith
which we have felt should never be a chain, and our obligations to it
are fully discharged when we have carefully enveloped it in the purple
shroud within the folds of which slumber the Gods that are dead."

[Footnote 1: [Greek: ATHAENAS DAEMOKRATIAS], Le Bas. I. 32nd Inscrip.]

ST. RENAN.

When I come to look at things very closely, I see that I have changed
very little; my destiny had practically welded me, from my earliest
youth, to the place which I was to hold in the world. My vocation was
thoroughly matured when I came to Paris; before leaving Brittany my
life had been mapped out. By the mere force of things, and despite
my conscientious efforts to the contrary, I was predestined to
become what I am, a member of the romantic school, protesting against
romanticism, a Utopian inculcating the doctrine of half-measures, an
idealist unsuccessfully attempting to pass muster for a Philistine, a
tissue of contradictions, resembling the double-natured _hircocerf_
of scholasticism. One of my two halves must have been busy demolishing
the other half, like the fabled beast of Ctesias which unwittingly
devoured its own paws. As was well said by that keen observer,
Challemel-Lacour: "He thinks like a man, feels like a woman, and acts
like a child." I have no reason to complain of such being the case, as
this moral constitution has procured for me the keenest intellectual
joys which man can taste.

My race, my family, my native place, and the peculiar circle in which
I was brought up, by diverting me from all material pursuits, and by
rendering me unfit for anything except the treatment of things of the
mind, had made of me an idealist, shut out from everything else. The
application of my intellect might have been a different one, but the
principle would have remained the same. The true sign of a vocation
is the impossibility of getting away from it: that is to say, of
succeeding in anything except that for which one was created. The man
who has a vocation mechanically sacrifices everything to his dominant
task. External circumstances might, as so often happens, have checked
the cause of my life and prevented me from following my natural bent,
but my utter incapability of succeeding in anything else would have
been the protest of baffled duty, and Predestination would in one way
have been triumphant by proving the subject of the experiment to be
powerless outside the kind of labour for