Renan serves as one of the best examples of a free thinker remaining a devotee of his faith, though discarding all the tenets on which it rests. His early religious training had a permanent influence on him, and he was a Christian all his life, even though he differed with the church. In one of his last and most profound essays, the "Examination of the Human Conscience," he gives us a confession of his faith. Here he appears as a pantheist, but ventures incredible guesses that there may be a supernatural. His church mind plays havoc with his Spinozism, and we see his early infantile influences. Intellectually at times he stands high, higher it may be said without irreverence than his master Jesus, since he had at his command a knowledge of science and philosophy with which Jesus was unfamiliar. The greatness of Renan appears in his _Philosophical Dialogues_, in his _Philosophical Dramas_, in his _Future of Science_, in the _Anti-Christ_ and other essays and books. When he moralises he is a monk; when he speculates on philosophic and scientific subjects, he is a thinker. George Brandes's Renan as a dramatist is an excellent study.[F] Yet literature scarcely offers such an instance of a man projecting himself upon a historical character. Such a projection is similar to the seeking, in an unusual degree, by nervous people of moral shelter and consolation in some other person. The reposing of Renan on Jesus gives us an insight into the birth of worship of religious founders. Pfister, a disciple of Freud, and himself a Christian pastor, says: "In the divine father-love, he, whose longing for help, for ethical salvation, is not satisfied by the surrounding reality, finds an asylum. In the love for the Saviour, the love-thirsting soul which finds no comprehension and no return love in his fellowmen is refreshed." A complete psychoanalytic study of Renan, which this essay does not pretend to be, would make a fuller inquiry into his relations with his mother, his affection for his sister and her influence on him and his never-swerving admiration for the priests who were his early teachers. He has left tributes to all of them. They ruled his life. In his unconscious a fixation upon them was buried. His love for them kept him a Christian, when intellectually he was a free thinker. They are present in his _Life of Christ_, and the psychoanalyst can see them guiding the pen of Renan. They are always with him. Had they not loved him and he them so intensely, had he not inherited so strongly those meek, effeminate and kindly traits, his temperament might have been as unchristian as his intellect.