The people who still hold to this kind of faith represent the antique world endeavouring to perpetuate itself without a compromise in the bosom of the new world, the world of modern society. The barbarian does not wish to yield to the progress of ideas and of manners; if such people formed the majority of the nation they would constitute the greatest danger to human reason, to science, and to truth. Literal faith, in effect, makes naked truth a subject of pudicity; one does not dare to look it in the face or lift the sacred veil that hides its beauty; you find yourself in the midst of a conspiracy, mysterious beings surround you, putting their hands before your eyes and a finger on your lips. Dogma holds you, possesses you, masters you in spite of yourself; it is fixed in your heart and petrified in your intelligence: it is not without reason that faith has been compared to an anchor that has caught on the bottom and checked the vessel in its course, while the open and free ocean stretches beyond as far as the eye can reach. And who shall break the anchor from his heart? When you shake it loose in one place, faith settles to its hold somewhere else; you have a thousand weak points at which it attacks you. You can completely abandon a philosophical doctrine; but you cannot break away absolutely from a collection of beliefs in which blind and literal faith has borne sway; there is always something left; you will carry the scars and marks from it as slaves who are freed still carry on their flesh the signs of their servitude. You are branded in the heart, you shall feel the effects of it always; you shall have moments of dread and shuddering, of mystic enthusiasm, of distrust of reason, of need to represent things as being other than they really are, to see what is not, and not to see what is. The fiction that was early forced upon your soul shall often seem to you sweeter than the sound and rugged truth, you need to know; you shall hate yourself for the sin of knowledge. * * * * * [Sidenote: Intolerance incident to faith.]