more stable. M. Renan is an example of it. His transmutation into a fresh-water fish was achieved in reality tranquilly enough; it is doubtful whether he ever dreams now of the salt-water stretches of the Bible, and nobody has ever declared so forcibly that he is happy. One might almost make it a matter of reproach to him, and suggest that the profoundest happiness is sometimes not so precisely aware of itself. If every absolute faith is a little naïve, one is not absolutely without naïveté when one is too confident of one’s own happiness. [Sidenote: The essential cheapness of religious speculation.] To the surprise and to the disenchantment which a former Christian experiences in the presence of scientific truth may be opposed the even more profound astonishment which those who have been exclusively nourished on science experience in the presence of religious dogma. The man of science can understand religious dogmas, for he can follow the course of their birth and development century by century; but he experiences, in his effort to adapt himself to this narrow environment, something of the difficulty that he might feel in an effort to enter a Liliputian fairy palace. The world of religion—with the ridiculous importance which it ascribes to the earth as the centre of the universe, with the palpable moral errors that the Bible contains, with its whole body of legend, which is affecting only to those who believe in them, with its superannuated rites—all seems so poor, so powerless to symbolize the infinite, that the man of science is inclined to see in these infantine dreams the repugnant and despicable side rather than the elevated and attractive side. Livingstone says that one day, after having preached the Gospel to a new tribe, he was taking a walk in the neighbouring fields when he heard near him, behind a bush, a strange noise like a convulsive cough; he there found a young negro who had been taken by an irresistible desire to laugh by the account of the Biblical legends, and had hidden himself there out of respect for Livingstone, and in the shadow of the bush was writhing with laughter and unable to reply to the questions of the worthy pastor. Certainly the surprising legends of religion can give rise to no such outburst of gaiety as this in one who has spent his life among the facts of science and the reasoned theories of philosophy. He feels rather a certain bitterness, such as one feels generally in the presence of human feebleness, for man feels something of the same solidarity in the presence of human error as in the presence of human suffering. If the eighteenth century ridiculed superstition, if the human mind was then “dancing,” as Voltaire said, “in chains,” it is the distinction of our epoch more accurately to have estimated the weight of those chains; and in truth, when one examines coolly the poverty of the popular attempts that have been made to represent the world and the ideal of mankind,