"You consider it a great moral movement, Monsieur?" "Moral because all petty egoisms were obliterated," answered Renan. "Men seemed for a moment to become the incarnations of ideas. Oh, on both sides. Charlotte Corday, Danton, Madame Roland, Robespierre, Desmoulins, Larochejacquelin; each individuality seems to have had its definite mission, each seems to have been equally necessary, equally an instrument of justice." "You have said, Monsieur," continued Leo, after a pause, "that the socialists would revive in one form the twin tyrannies of Church and State, and destroy the ideal of individual liberty. You have also said that the ancient conception of Church and State was a unity. Would the kind of socialism which you sketch resemble the Greek State?" "No ancient State, not even Athens, extended to its citizens the liberty which we enjoy," answered Renan. "The State intervened in the private affairs of the citizens; and Athens is notorious for having pursued the philosophers with accusations of impiety. The noble conservative families and the priesthood combined to stifle the new liberal thought. The State, however, was democratic; the people ruled, decided by their votes the policy of the State, and served on juries, or as judges. Socialism condemns democracy: it aspires to govern not by the will of the people, but according to its own interpretation of what it calls scientific principles; and it seems that in its application of these principles, it would be more bigoted and intolerant than the democratic State in Greece ever was." "Nothing then is permanent, which crystallises into an hierarchy, or is limited by an institution," said Leo. "It seems to me that your gospel is purely destructive. The whole progress of modern science is marked by the ruins of ancient altars; you have freed mankind from all moral obligations in denying that he is a responsible agent, and in showing that he is merely a creature of inherited instincts; you have shown him that his life is no more than a ripple on the water, a sudden stir of wind in the leaves, a momentary light in the darkness; you have denied the God that his heart fashioned as a solace to his grief, a lamp to guide him; you have taught him to seek for the perishable glories of the earth. How will you make him a moral being again?" Renan smiled.