It is only those who have been reared in a faith, and then disabused of it, that preserve, along with their primitive sentiments, a certain home-sickness for a belief to correspond to these sentiments. The reason is that they have been violently hastened in their passage from belief to incredulity. The story of the passing disenchantment with life, which the recent disbeliever experiences, has often been told. “I felt horribly exiled,” M. Renan once said, in speaking of the moral crisis through which he himself had passed. “The fish in Lake Baikal have taken thousands of years, it is said, to transform themselves from salt-water to fresh-water fish. I had to achieve my own transformation in the course of some weeks. Catholicism surrounds the whole of life like an enchanted circle with so much magic that, when one is deprived of it, everything seems insipid and melancholy; the universe looked to me like a desert. If Christianity was not true, everything else seemed to me to be indifferent, frivolous, scarce worthy of attention; the world looked mediocre, morally impoverished to me. The world seemed to me to be in its dotage and decadence; I felt lost in a nation of pigmies.” This pain incident to metamorphosis, this sort of despair at renouncing everything that one has believed and loved up to that time, is not peculiar to the Christian who has fallen away from Christianity; it exists in diverse degrees, as M. Renan well knew, whenever a love of any sort comes to an end in us. For him who, for example, has placed his whole life in the love of a woman and feels himself betrayed by her, life seems not less disenchanted than for the believer who sees himself abandoned by his God. Even simple intellectual errors may produce an analogous sentiment. Archimedes no doubt would have felt his life crumble away beneath him, if he had discovered irremediable lacunæ in his chain of theorems. The more intimately a god has been personified and humanized, the more intimately he comes to be beloved, and the greater must be the wound he leaves behind when he deserts the heart. But even though this wound be in certain instances incurable, that fact constitutes no argument in support of the religion of the masses, for an illegitimate and unjustifiable love may cause as much suffering when one is deprived of it as a legitimate love. The bitterness of truth lies less in truth itself than in the resistance offered to it by intrenched and established error. It is not the world which is desert when deprived of the god of our dreams, it is our own heart; and we have ourselves to blame if we have filled our hearts with nothing better than dreams. For the rest, in the majority of cases, the void, the sense of loss which a religion leaves behind, is not lasting; one adapts one’s self to one’s new moral environment, one becomes happy again; no doubt not in the same manner—one is never happy twice in the same manner—but in a manner less primitive, less infantine,