as they were understood in the sixteenth century; but, at the same time, far from forgetting the moral sciences, he assigns to them, for each day, a definite place and an equally practical character.  ’As soon as Pantagruel was up,’ he says, ’some page or other of the sacred Scripture was read with him aloud and distinctly, with pronunciation suited to the subject. . . .  In accordance with the design and purport of this lesson, he at frequent intervals devoted himself to doing reverence and saying prayers to the good God, whose majesty and marvellous judgments were shown forth in what was read. . . .  When evening came, he and his teacher briefly recapitulated together, after the manner of the Pythagoreans, all that he had read, seen, learned, and heard in the course of the whole day.  They prayed to God the Creator, worshipping Him, glorifying Him for his boundless goodness, giving Him thanks for all the time that was past, and commending themselves to His divine mercy for all that was to come.  This done, they went to their rest.’  And at the end of this course of education, so complete both from the worldly and the religious point of view, Rabelais shows us young Pantagruel living in affectionate and respectful intimacy with his father Gargantua, who, as he sees him off on his travels, gives him these last words of advice:  Science without conscience is nought but ruin to the soul; it behooves thee to serve, love, and fear God.  Have thou in suspicion the abuses of the world; set not thine heart on vanity, for this life is transitory, but the word of God abideth forever.  Reverence thy teachers; flee the company of those whom thou wouldest not resemble. . . .  And when thou feelest sure that thou hast acquired all that is to be learned yonder, return to me that I may see thee and give thee my blessing ere I die.’”

After what was said above about the personal habits and the works of Rabelais, these are certainly not the ideas, sentiments, and language one would expect to find at the end and as the conclusion of his life and his book.  And it is precisely on account of this contrast that more space has been accorded in this history to the man and his book than would in the natural course of things have been due to them.  At bottom and, beyond their mere appearances the life and the book of Rabelais are a true and vivid reflection of the moral and social ferment characteristic of his time.  A time of innovation and of obstruction, of corruption and of regeneration, of decay and of renaissance, all at once.  A deeply serious crisis in a strong and complicated social system, which had been hitherto exposed to the buffets and the risks of brute force, but was intellectually full of life and aspiration, was in travail of a double yearning for reforming itself and setting itself in order, and did indeed, in the sixteenth century, attempt at one and the same time a religious and a political reformation, the object whereof, missed as it was at that period, is still at the bottom of all true Frenchmen’s trials and struggles.  This great movement of the sixteenth century we are now about to approach, and will attempt to fix its character with precision and mark the imprint of its earliest steps.