There would be something beyond mere practical wisdom in such law-giving, an exquisite sense of the pathos of human life and its requirements; scapulars, indulgences and sacraments are needed by the weak and the ageing, sacraments especially. "They make you believe but they stupefy you;" these words are Pascal's, the great light of the Catholic Church. III My Protestant sympathies go back very far, further back than these Confessions; I find them in a French sonnet, crude and diffuse in versification, of the kind which finds favour with the very young, a sonnet which I should not publish did it not remind me of two things especially dear to me, my love of France and Protestantism. Je t'apporte mon drame, o poète sublime, Ainsi qu'un écolier au maître sa leçon: Ce livre avec fierté porte comme écusson Le sceau qu'en nos esprits ta jeune gloire imprime. Accepte, tu verras la foi mêlée au crime, Se souiller dans le sang sacré de la raison, Quand surgit, rédempteur du vieux peuple saxon, Luther à Wittemberg comme Christ à Solime. Jamais de la cité le mal entier ne fuit, Hélas! et son autel y fume dans la nuit; Mais notre âge a ceci de pareil à l'aurore. Que c'est un divin cri du chanteur éternal, Le tien, qui pour forcer le jour tardif d'éclore Déchire avec splendeur le voile épars du ciel. I find not only my Protestant sympathies in the "Confessions" but a proud agnosticism, and an exalted individualism which in certain passages leads the reader to the sundered rocks about the cave of Zarathoustra. My book was written before I heard that splendid name, before Zarathoustra was written; and the doctrine, though hardly formulated, is in the "Confessions," as Darwin is in Wallace. Here ye shall find me, the germs of all I have written are in the "Confessions," "Esther Waters" and "Modern Painting," my love of France--the country as Pater would say of my instinctive election--and all my prophecies. Manet, Degas, Whistler, Monet, Pissaro, all these have come into their inheritance. Those whom I brushed aside, where are they? Stevenson, so well described as the best-dressed young man that ever walked in the Burlington Arcade, has slipped into nothingness despite the journalists and Mr Sidney Colvin's batch of letters. Poor Colvin, he made a mistake, he should have hopped on to Pater. Were it not for a silly phrase about George Eliot, who surely was no more than one of those dull clever people, unlit by any ray of genius, I might say with Swinburne I have nothing to regret, nothing to withdraw. Maybe a few flippant remarks about my private friends; but to withdraw them would be unmanly, unintellectual, and no one may re-write his confessions.