"Ingrates!" says the garment. "I have sheltered you in the bad weather. Why do you cast me off?" "I come from the deep sea," says the fish. "I was once the rose," says the perfume. "I have loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent. To this there is one answer: "Yes, in times past." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of things that are dead, and the government of men by embalmment, to restore to life dogmas that are rotting away, to regild the shrines, to replaster the cloisters, to reconsecrate the reliquaries, to refurnish the superstitions, to galvanize the fanaticisms, to put new handles on the holy water sprinklers, to set up again monastic and military rule, to believe in the saving of society by the multiplication of parasites, to impose the past on the present,--this seems strange. There are, however, theorists for these theories. These theorists, sensible men in other respects, have a very simple expedient. They varnish the past with a coating which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, respect for ancestors, ancient authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about crying, "Here! take this, my good people." This logic was known to the ancients. The soothsayers used to practise it They rubbed with chalk a black heifer, and said, "She is white." _Bos cretatus._ As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it always, provided that it consents to stay dead. If it tries to come to life again, we attack it, and we try to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, though they are only phantoms, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and claws in their obscurity, and we must grapple with them body to body, and make war upon them, and war without truce; for it is the fate of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. The spectre is hard to take by the throat, and throw to earth. A convent in France in the full noon of the nineteenth century is a college of owls blinking at the daylight. A cloister in the open act of asceticism, in the very midst of the city of '89, of 1830, and of 1848,--Rome blossoming in Paris,--is an anachronism. At any ordinary time, to lay an anachronism, and make it vanish, we need only to make it spell out the date. But we are not in ordinary times. Let us fight. Let us fight; but let us distinguish. The essence of truth consists in never exaggerating. What need has she of exaggerating? There are some things that must be destroyed, and there are some things that need only be lighted up and looked at. Kind and serious examination, what a power it is! Let us not use fire where light will answer even purpose.