Many persons who allow that I have a perspicuous mind wonder how I came during my boyhood and youth to put faith in creeds, the impossibility of which has since been so clearly revealed to me.  Nothing, however, can be more simple, and it is very probable that if an extraneous incident had not suddenly taken me from the honest but narrow-minded associations amid which my youth was passed, I should have preserved all my life long the faith which in the beginning appeared to me as the absolute expression of the truth.  I have said how I was educated in a small school kept by some honest priests, who taught me Latin after the old fashion (which was the right one), that is to say to read out of trumpery primers, without method and almost without grammer, as Erasmus and the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, who are the best Latin scholars since the days of old, used to learn it.  These worthy priests were patterns of all that is good.  Devoid of anything like pedagogy, to use the modern phrase, they followed the first rule of education, which is not to make too easy the tasks which have for their aim the mastering of a difficulty.  Their main object was to make their pupils into honourable men.  Their lessons of goodness and morality, which impressed me as being the literal embodiments of virtue and high feeling, were part and parcel of the dogma which they taught.  The historical education they had given me consisted solely in reading Rollin.  Of criticism, the natural sciences, and philosophy I as yet knew nothing of course.  Of all that concerned the nineteenth century, and the new ideas as to history and literature expounded by so many gifted thinkers, my teachers knew nothing.  It was impossible to imagine a more complete isolation from the ambient air.  A thorough-paced Legitimist would not even admit the possibility of the Revolution or of Napoleon being mentioned except with a shudder.  My only knowledge of the Empire was derived from the lodge-keeper of the school.  He had in his room several popular prints.  “Look at Bonaparte,” he said to me one day, pointing to one of these, “he was a patriot, he was!” No allusion was ever made to contemporary literature, and the literature of France terminated with Abbe Delille.  They had heard of Chateaubriand, but, with a truer instinct than that of the would-be Neo-Catholics, whose heads are crammed with all sorts of delusions, they mistrusted him.  A Tertullian enlivening his Apologeticum with Atala and Rene was not calculated to command their confidence.  Lamartine perplexed them more sorely still; they guessed that his religious faith was not built on very strong foundations, and they foresaw his subsequent falling away.  This gift of observation did credit to their orthodox sagacity, but the result was that the horizon of their pupils was a very narrow one.  Rollin’s Traite des Etudes is a work full of large-minded views compared to the circle of pious mediocrity within which they felt it their duty to confine themselves.