Emile Combes is a native of Roquecourbe, in the south of France, where he was born on September 6, 1835. His parents were good, honest people, filled with that simple piety which characterizes the true French peasant. He had an uncle, the Abbe Gaubert, curé of Bion to whose generous interest the future politician owed his first advances in life. Through the influence of this good man the young Combes entered, in 1846, the _petit seminaire_ of Castres, the scholars of which were supposed to have the first promptings of ecclesiastical vocation. During his college days the young man certainly gave every evidence of profound faith and devotion. The lessons of his pious mother made him, as he says himself, believe to the very depths of his soul. In his twentieth year he entered the Grand Seminary at Albi. While in this institution he received minor orders, thereby proclaiming to the world his intention of preparing for the priesthood. For two years his purpose remained unchanged. He even fortified himself therein by deep and special studies in scholastic theology, and has left as memorials of his better life two treatises in that matter: _A Study of the Psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas_, and _The Controversy between St. Bernard and Abelard_, copies of which are still extant in the library of the Sorbonne at Paris. Whether the vocation of Emile Combes was real or not, he certainly abandoned it in the midst of his ecclesiastical studies. He quitted the Seminary and became a professor in the College of the Assumption at Nimes, an institution established by the Abbe d'Alzon, founder of the religious order of the Assumptionists. Here he remained for three years, until 1860. He taught then in another Catholic college at Pons. Hitherto there had been no certain indications of a weakening in his faith. But in 1864, as he was attending the medical school at Paris, he met with Renan. The acquaintanceship developed the seeds of that atheism which has since become his ruling quality. To one who reads French history it ought not to be surprising that a Catholic seminary should have sheltered the youth of a man like Combes. Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits, whom he betrayed; Renan was once a student in St. Sulpice; Gambetta, the leader of anti-clericalism in the stormy 80's, studied in his boyhood in a _petit seminaire_. That they proved false to their early teaching is not remarkable when one considers the disaffection of an apostle who was privileged to enjoy an intimacy with the Savior of the world.