the Church, and he reminds the “Christians”[13] who railed against him as an unbeliever that Jesus had had much more influence upon him than they gave him credit for, and, more particularly, that his break with the Church was due to loyalty to Jesus. By such loyalty Renan meant not a blind worship, but a reverence which endeavoured to appreciate and follow the ideals for which Jesus himself stood. It did not involve slavish acceptance of all he said, even if that were intelligible, and clear, which it is not. “To be a Platonist,” remarks Renan, “I need not adore Plato, or believe _all_ that he said.”[14] [13] Renan complains of the ignorance of the clergy of Rome regarding his own work, which they did not understand because they had not read it, merely relying on the Press and other sources for false and biassed accounts. [14] _Cf._ Renan’s Essay in _Questions contemporaines_ on “_L’Avenir religieux des Sociétés modernes_.” Renan is in agreement with the central ideas of Jesus’ own faith, and he rightly regards him as one of the greatest contributors to the world’s religious thought. Renan’s religion is free from supernaturalism and dogma. He believes in infinite Goodness or Providence, but he despises the vulgar and crude conceptions of God which so mar a truly religious outlook. He points out how prayer, in the sense of a request to Heaven for a particular object, is becoming recognised as foolish. ‘As a “meditation,” an interview with one’s own conscience, it has a deeply religious value. The vulgar idea of prayer reposes on an immoral conception of God. Renan rightly sees the central importance for religion of possessing a sane view of the divinity, not one which belongs to primitive tribal wargods and weather-gods. He aptly says, in this connection, that the one who was defeated in 1871 was not only France but _le bon Dieu_ to which she in vain appealed. In his place was to be found, remarks Renan with a little sarcasm, “only a Lord God of Hosts who was unmoved by the moral ‘délicatesse’ of the Uhlans and the incontestable excellence of the Prussian shells.”[15] He rightly points to the immoral use made of the divinity by pious folk whose whole religion is utilitarian and materialistic. They do good only in order to get to heaven or escape hell,[16] and believe in God because it is necessary for them to have a confidant and sonsoler, to whom they may cry in time of trouble, and to whose will they may resignedly impute the evil chastisement which their own errors have brought upon them individually or collectively. But, he rightly claims, it is only where utilitarian calculations and self-interest end, that religion begins with the sense of the Infinite and of the Ideal Goodness and Beauty and Love. [15] _Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques_, p. ix. [16] One pious individual thought to convert Renan himself by writing him every month, quite briefly, to this effect “There is a hell.”