“Happy are the children who only sleep and dream, and who never have a thought of entering upon this struggle with God Himself!  I see around me men of pure and simple mind, whom Christianity suffices to render virtuous and happy.  God grant that they may never develop the miserable faculty of criticism which so imperiously demands satisfaction, and which, when once satisfied, leaves such little happiness in the soul!  Would to God that it were in my power to suppress it.  I would not hesitate at amputation if it were lawful and possible.  Christianity satisfies all my faculties except one, which is the most exacting of them all, because it is by right judge over all the others.  Would it not be a contradiction in terms to impose conviction upon the faculty which creates conviction?  I am well aware that the orthodox will tell me that it is my own fault if I have fallen into this condition.  I will not argue the point; no man knows whether he is worthy of love or hatred.  I am quite willing, therefore, to say that it is my fault, provided those who love me promise to pity me and continue me their friendship.

“A result which now seems beyond all doubt is that I shall not revert to orthodoxy by continuing to follow the same line,—­I mean that of rational and critical self-examination.  Up till now, I hoped that after having travelled over the circle of doubt I should come back to the starting-point.  I have quite lost this hope, and a return to Catholicism no longer seems possible to me, except by a receding movement, by stopping short in the path which I have entered, by stigmatising reason, by declaring it for once and all null and void, and by condemning it to respectful silence.  Each step in my career of criticism takes me further away from the starting-point.  Have I, then, lost all hope of coming back to Catholicism?  That would be too bitter a thought.  No, sir, I have no hopes of reverting to it by rational progress; but I have often been on the point of repudiating for once and all the guide whom at times I mistrust.  What would then be the motive of my life?  I cannot tell; but activity will ever find scope.  You may be sure that I must have been sorely forced to have dwelt for one instant upon a thought which seems more cruel to me than death.  And yet, if my conscience represented it to me as lawful, I should eagerly avail myself of it, if only out of common decency.

“I hope at all events that those who know me will admit that interested motives have not estranged me from Christianity.  Have not all my material interests tempted me to find it true?  The temporal considerations against which I have had to struggle would have sufficed to persuade many others; my heart has need of Christianity; the Gospel will ever be my moral law; the church has given me my education, and I love her.  Could I but continue to style myself her son!  I pass from her in spite of myself; I abhor the dishonest attacks levelled at her; I frankly confess that I have no complete substitute for her teaching; but I cannot disguise from myself the weak points which I believe that I have found in it and with regard to which it is impossible to effect a compromise, because we have to do with a doctrine in which all the component parts hold together and cannot be detached.