"It is more," said Renan; "it is rational. How puerile is the mortal conception of paradise! Man has imagined a place where virtue is rewarded and vice punished. He believes in it with a passionate conviction, because he is not quite sure. He forgets that virtue must be disinterested, or it ceases to be virtue. If man is capable of a free and unhampered choice between vice and virtue, if the distinction between them be clear and precise, and the reward or punishment entailed by the choice definite and finally revealed, mankind, then, is obviously divided into two parts: the astute and the infatuate. One feels immediately that both the reward and the punishment are excessive; or else that vice and virtue have ceased to exist. However, in mortal things there is always an element of doubt, and perhaps the chief glory of man is born from it. Our choice is not entirely free, the distinction is not absolutely clear, the reward is purely hypothetical." "Ah, M. Renan," said Leo, "why are you here? You were always a believer at heart; one might almost say a scholastic. You invented a system of doubt, as others might a system of faith; even your doubts were affirmations. Science with you was only a synonym for God, and round it you constructed an hierarchy of saints and martyrs, a church suffering, militant, triumphant. Lucian----" "He is here," said Renan. "Lucian," continued Leo, "imagined the soul of Plato inhabiting a paradise constructed after the model of his own Republic. I imagine you projected into that strange future which you announced in your _Dialogues Philosophiques_."