[Sidenote: Preliminary acquisition of falsehood not necessary to recognition of truth.] Like M. Renan, Mr. Max Müller almost sees an example to be followed in the castes established by the Hindus among the minds, as among the classes of the people, in the regular periods or asrâmas through which they oblige the intelligence successively to pass, in the hierarchy of religions with which they burden the spirit of the faithful. For them traditional error is sacred and venerable; it serves as a preparation for the truth; one must place a bandage on the eyes of the neophyte in order to be able to take it off again afterward. The tendencies of the modern mind are precisely the opposite; it likes to supply the present generation at once, and without superfluous preliminary, with the whole body of truth acquired by the generations which have passed away, without false respect or false courtesy for the errors it replaces; it is not enough that the light should filter into the mind through some secret rift, the doors and windows must be thrown wide open. The modern mind fails to see in what respect a deliberate effort to inculcate absurdity in a portion of the community can serve to secure rectitude of judgment in the remaining portions; or in what respect it is necessary to build a house of truth upon a foundation of falsehood; or to run down the part of the hill that we have already climbed, as a preparation for climbing higher. [Sidenote: Transformation of faith inevitable.] If the religious sentiment should disappear, it may be objected, it would leave a void which it would be impossible to fill, and humanity’s horror of a vacuum is even greater than nature’s. Humanity, therefore, would satisfy somehow or other, even with absurdities, that eternal need of believing of which we have spoken above. The instant one religion is destroyed another takes its place; it will be always so from age to age, because the religious sentiment will always exist as a continuing need for some object of worship which it will create and re-create in spite of all the ratiocination in the world. No victory over nature can be lasting; no permanent need in the human breast can be long silenced. There are periods in human life when faith is as imperious as love; one experiences a hunger to embrace something, to give one’s self—even to a figment of the imagination; one is a victim to a fever of faith. Sometimes this mood lasts throughout one’s whole life, sometimes it lasts some days only or some hours; there are cases in which it does not present itself till late, and even very late, in life. And the priest has taken note of all these vicissitudes; he is always there, patient, waiting tranquilly for the moment when the symptoms shall appear, and the sleeping sentiment shall awaken and become masterful; he has the Host ready, he has great temples reverberating with sacred prayers, where man may come to kneel, and breathe in the spirit of God, and arise strengthened.