"He died, my dear Cecelia, the day of your first communion. Those are two memories which will, I hope, never leave your heart, my dear child. I had a presentiment of his death when I asked you to pray particularly on that morning for your grandfather at Arbois. Your prayers will surely be very agreeable to God at such a time, and who knows if grandpa himself did not know of them and did not rejoice with our little Jeanne [a daughter who had died the year before] over the pious sentiments of Cecelia?" It is not surprising, then, to find many other expressions of Pasteur's extreme interest in spiritual things, though they might have been little expected from a man so deeply immersed in scientific investigations as he was. After all, it must not be forgotten that his discoveries, by solving the mystery that surrounds the origin of disease, cleared some of the ways of Providence of that inscrutable character which is supposed in shallow minds to constitute the greatest part of their impressiveness. With epidemics explained, not as dispensations of Divine Providence, but as representing the sanction of nature for the violation of natural laws, one of the {318} reasons for which mankind worshipped the Deity seemed to be gone. The man who had done most to make clear these mysterious processes of nature was, however, himself far from thinking that materialism offers any adequate explanation of the mysteries of life, or of the relations of man to man, and of man to his Creator. Impatient at the pretensions of such pseudoscientists, Pasteur once said: "Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory."