Christianity, too often sunk into mere mechanical routine, teeming with abuses, overloaded with observances, had practically lost all influence. Side by side with a few clergy somewhat above the rank and file in culture, there was a crowd of empirics who rarely troubled their heads with thinking things out for themselves; they discoursed, not of love or hope, but only of faith—a faith which brutish men wished to destroy, and the more refined few wished to vivify, and which was thus doubly imperilled. The common people were indifferent, and allowed themselves still to be lulled by the old crooning melodies to which they were accustomed; they remained Christian from sheer indolence, like many men of quality; but it was open to question whether the first shock would not set them clamouring for a more lively tune—an “air of flutes and violins,” as Heine said; paradise instead of hell. As to learning, the cultured were agreed in recognising its failure; that, indeed, was beyond question. Men were tired of reasoning, reading, writing, worrying! Learning in tragic dismay sought only to prostrate itself before faith; or rather, men asked themselves whether learning really existed. Tiphernus, an eminent professor at the Sorbonne, and in high favour at Rome, confesses that all this learning so much belauded and paraded seemed to him nothing but a means of earning a living for professors, a combination of all the vanities, the technical slang of a crowd of pedants, critics more or less ignorant, and shameless imitators, who formed little cliques beyond whose pale there was no salvation. “To believe them,” he exclaimed, “we are not equal to the ancients”: then lions forsooth have lost their ferocity, and hares their cowardice, for Providence shines for the whole world, and it cannot be that man alone has degenerated! A league of falsehood! he reiterates. Under cloak of high culture men conceal their vices, and especially their idleness. Do what we may, we are progressing: every one of us is conscious of a forward impulsion. The pontiffs of reason, who have painfully climbed the steep ascent, wish to keep everything to themselves, and to set up their books as a balk to the world, but all in vain; they will never persuade us that their collapse is that of nature.