No happiness was possible, whether moral or material, save in the possession of knowledge. The view inspired by the Gospel dictum, 'Happy the poor in spirit,'[8] had held mankind in a quagmire of wretchedness and bondage for ages. No, no! The poor in spirit are perforce mere cattle, fit flesh for slavery and for suffering. As long as there shall be a multitude of the poor in spirit, so will there be a multitude of wretched beings, mere beasts of burden, exploited, preyed upon by an infinitesimal minority of thieves and bandits. The happy people will one day be that which is possessed of knowledge and will. It is from the black pessimism based on sundry passages of the Bible that the world must be delivered--the world, terrified, crushed down for more than two thousand years, living solely for the sake of death. Nothing could be more dangerous than to take the old Semite doctrine as the only moral and social code. Happy, on the contrary, are those who know--happy the intelligent, the men of will and action, for the kingdom of the world shall belong to them! That was the cry which now arose to Marc's lips, from his whole being, in a great transport of faith and enthusiasm. [Footnote 8: This is how the French render the well-known words of the Sermon on the Mount, as given in Matthew v. 2. It will be remembered that in Luke vi. 20, only the word 'poor' is given, 'in spirit' being omitted. I must confess that I do not know what the 'higher criticism' has to say of this inconsistency, and I am not learned enough to express an opinion of any value on the Greek texts.--_Trans._] And all at once he arrived at a decision: he would accept Salvan's offer, he would come to Maillebois as elementary master, and he would contend against the Church, against that contamination of the people, of which he had witnessed one of the delirious fits at the ridiculous ceremony held that afternoon. He would work for the liberation of the humble, he would strive to make them free citizens. To win back those masses whom he saw weighed down by ignorance and falsehood, incapable of justice, he would go to the children and to the children's children, instruct them, and, little by little, create a people of truth who, then alone, would become a people of justice. That was the loftiest duty, the most pressing good work, that on which depended the country's very salvation, its strength and glory in its liberating and justice-bringing mission through the ages and through the other nations. And if, after three days' hesitation and anguish at the idea of imperilling the happiness he enjoyed in Geneviève's arms, a moment had sufficed for Marc to arrive at that weighty decision, was it not that he had also found himself confronted by the serious problem of the position of woman, whom the Church had turned into a mere stupefied serf, an instrument of falsity and destruction?