“I very much like being here.  The tone of the place is excellent, being equally free from rusticity, coarse egotism and affectation.  There is little intimacy or geniality, but the conversation is dignified and elevated, with scarcely a trace of commonplace or gossip.  It would be idle to look for anything like cordiality between the directors and the students, for this is a plant which grows only in Brittany.  But the directors have a certain fund of tolerance and kindness in their composition which harmonises very well with the moral condition of the young men upon their joining the seminary.  Their control is exercised almost imperceptibly, for the seminary seems to conduct itself, instead of being conducted by them.  The regulations, the usages, and the spirit of the place are the sole agents; the directors are mere passive overseers.  St. Sulpice is a machine which has been well constructed for the last two hundred years:  it goes of itself, and all that the driver has to do is to watch the movements, and from time to time to screw up a nut and oil the joints.  It is not like Saint-Nicholas, for instance, where the machine was never allowed to go by itself.  The driver was always tinkering at it, running first to the right and then to the left, peering in here and altering a wheel there, not knowing or remembering that the best mounted machine is the one which requires the least attention from the man who sets it in motion.  The great advantage which I enjoy here is the remarkable facility afforded me for work which has become a prime necessity to me, and which, considering my internal condition, is also a duty.  The lectures on morals are excellent, but I cannot say as much of those on dogma, as the professor is a novice.  This, coupled with the great importance of the Traites de la Religion et de l’Eglise, especially in my case, would be a very serious drawback, but for my having found substitutes for him among the other professors.”  As a matter of fact, I had a special liking for the ecclesiastical sciences.  A text once implanted in my memory was never forgotten; my head was in the state of a Sic et Non of Abelard.  Theology is like a Gothic cathedral, having in common with its grandeur its vast empty spaces and its lack of solidity.  Neither to the Fathers of the Church nor to the Christian writers during the first half of the Middle Ages did it occur to draw up a systematic exposition of the Christian dogmas which would dispense with reading the Bible all through.  The Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, a summary of the earlier scholasticism, is like a vast bookcase with compartments, which, if Catholicism is to endure, will be of service to all time, the decisions of councils and of Popes in the future having, so to speak, their place marked out for them beforehand.  There can be no question of progress in such an order of exposition.  In the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent settled a number of points which had hitherto been the subject