This God of Gabriel’s having lost the corporeal form given to Him by religion, and as divulged in the history of the creation, lost at once all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite and being absorbed into it, became so impalpable and subtle to the intellect as to appear a phantasm.

Nothing remained to Gabriel of all his ancient beliefs.  His mind was like a bare field over which the whirlwind had passed, for his last belief, which had remained standing like a monolith in the midst of ruins, the belief in the history of creation, had now fallen.

But it was impossible to the former seminarist to remain inactive with his cargo of new ideas.  He felt obliged to believe in something, to devote to the defence of some ideal all the faith in his character, to make some use of that fervour of proselytising which had been so much admired in the class of eloquence in the seminary, and so revolutionary sociology took possession of him.  First of all it was Proudhon with his audacious writings, and afterwards the work was completed by some “militantes” who were working in the same printing office as himself—­old soldiers of the Commune, who had lately returned from their exile in the prisons of Oceania, and were renewing their campaign against social organisation with an ardour increased tenfold by their painful sufferings and their desire of vengeance.  With them he went to the anarchist meetings; there he heard Reclus and Prince Kropotkine, and the words of the since deceased Miquel Bakronhine came to him as the gospel of a Saint Paul of the future.

Gabriel had met with his new religion, and he gave himself over to it entirely, dreaming of the regeneration of humanity through its stomach.  Believing in a future life, misfortunes gave the false consolation of happiness after death; but all religion was a lie, there was no other life but that of the present, and Luna rose in anger against the social injustice that condemned millions of beings to poverty and misery for the happiness of a few privileged thousands.  Authority, which was the fount of all evil, was to him the greatest enemy; it must be destroyed, but men must be created who were capable of living without masters, priests or soldiers.  The natural gentleness of his character, and the horror of violence with which his three years’ campaigning had filled him, caused him rather to draw back from his new companions, who, dreaming of hecatombs from dynamite and the dagger to reform the world, obliged him to accept these new doctrines through fear.  No; he believed in the strength of the “idea,” and in the innocent evolution of humanity; he had only to work like the first apostles of Christianity certain of the future, but without hurrying, to see his ideas realised; he had only to fix his eyes on the day’s work, without thinking of the long years and centuries before it would bear its fruit.