"Man, that creature of incredible vanity and innumerable petty egoisms, refuses to consider for very long the melancholy spectacle of a world hastening merely towards its death, and carrying with it his whole store of spiritual experience, of poems and philosophies, theologics and sciences, which his forefathers have created, and his descendants shall renew. Therefore, when I considered the future of religion as an indispensable condition of life, and when I imagined further a kind of alliance between the proletariate and mine own Church, I based my calculations principally upon the feet that the great majority of men do not think; indeed, that they refuse to think. "Creeds may pass away, but the individuality of man changes, if at all, only by imperceptible degrees. Ages of faith and ages of scepticism recur, and give place to each other, with almost the same regularity as the ebb and flow of a tide. The age of Pericles was sceptical, the age of Cæsar was sceptical, the ages of Leo X. and Louis XV. were sceptical; but from age to age the peasant has sate by the fire after his day's work, dreaming the same dreams, and hearing nothing of the world's doubt. He is much the same kind of pagan as he always was. He has seized upon, in a way we cannot understand, the primitive, elementary conditions, which subsist in all religions. You were right, Monsieur, in tracing religion to him. He is its source. Perhaps he has never accepted Christianity; but Christianity has accepted him. Laborious, innocent, stupid, scarcely more human than the cattle, who are literally his foster-brothers, he looks out upon his little world with patient eyes, wondering; and he brings us the fruits of the earth and the bread of life." "I have said with Voltaire," murmured Renan, "that if a God did not exist we should have to invent one." Once again a deep, ironic smile creased about Leo's jaws.