M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the radical violences of M. Clémenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness. They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician" education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste.... C'est par le caractère que je suis resté essentiellement l'élève de mes anciens maîtres." He is proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:-- Il me plairait d'expliquer par le détail et de montrer comment la gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus cléricales, sans la foi qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les plus divertissantes. J'aimerais à raconter toutes les aventures que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenèrent, et les tours singuliers qu'elles m'ont joués. Après soixante ans de vie sérieuse on a le droit de sourire; et où trouver une source de rire plus abondante, plus à portée, plus inoffensive qu'en soimême? Si jamais un auteur comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur; je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles qu'il pourrait inventer.