In Taine’a great contemporary, Ernest Renan (1823-1892), a very different temper is seen. The two thinkers both possessed popularity as men of letters, and resembled one another in being devoted to literary and historical pursuits rather than to philosophy itself. Renan was trained for the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. He has left us a record of his early life in _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_. We there have an autobiography of a sincere and sensitive soul, encouraged in his priestly career by his family and his teachers to such a degree that he had conceived of no other career for himself, until at the age of twenty, under the influence of modern scientific doctrines and the criticism of the Biblical records, he found himself an unbeliever, certainly not a Roman Catholic, and not, in the ordinary interpretation of that rather vague term, a Christian. The harsh, unrelenting dogmatism of the Roman Church drove Renan from Christianity. We find him remarking that had he lived in a Protestant. country he might not have been faced with the dilemma.[10] A _via media_ might have presented itself in one of the very numerous forms into which Protestant Christianity, is divided. He might have exercised in such a sphere, his priestly functions as did Schleiermacher. Renan’s break with Rome emphasises the clear-cut division which exists in France between the Christian faith (represented, almost entirely by the Roman Church) and _libre-pensée_, a point which will claim our attention later, when we come to treat of the Philosophy of Religion. [10] Cf. his _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_, p. 292.