naturally have supposed that he believed himself specially endowed with this quality; it is at any rate the modesty which, if it shrinks into retirement from the pretensions of the crowd, goes along with a high and pitying sense of superiority, and a self-complacency of which the good humour never fails.  His masters also taught him to value purity.  For this he almost makes a sort of deprecating apology.  He saw, indeed, “the vanity of this virtue as of all the others”; he admits that it is an unnatural virtue.  But he says, “L’homme ne doit jamais se permettre deux hardiesses a la fois.  Le libre penseur doit etre regle en ses moeurs.”  In this doctrine it may be doubted whether he will find many followers.  An unnatural virtue, where nature only is recognised as a guide, is more likely to be discredited by his theory than recommended by his example, particularly if the state of opinion in France is such as is described in the following passage—­a passage which in England few men, whatever they might think, would have the boldness to state as an acknowledged social phenomenon:—­

Le monde, dont les jugements sont rarement tout a fait faux, voit une sorte de ridicule a etre vertueux quand on n’y est pas oblige par un devoir professionnel.  Le pretre, ayant pour etat d’etre chaste, comme le soldat d’etre brave, est, d’apres ces idees, presque le seul qui puisse sans ridicule tenir a des principes sur lesquels la morale et la mode se livrent les plus etranges combats.  Il est hors de doute qu’en ce point, comme en beaucoup d’autres, mes principes clericaux, conserves dans le siecle, m’ont nui aux yeux du monde.

We have one concluding observation to make.  This is a book of which the main interest, after all, depends on the way in which it touches on the question of questions, the truth and reality of the Christian religion.  But from first to last it docs not show the faintest evidence that the writer ever really knew, or even cared, what religion is.  Religion is not only a matter of texts, of scientific criticisms, of historical investigations, of a consistent theology.  It is not merely a procession of external facts and events, a spectacle to be looked at from the outside.  It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests.  It grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be man.  When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him as a serious and importunate reality, when he shows that he is unaffected by those deep movements and misgivings and anxieties of the soul to which religion corresponds, and treats the whole matter as a question only of erudition and criticism, we may acknowledge him to be an original and acute