that goes its way like a living touchstone, undistinguished, undiscovered, and tentative, perhaps voluntarily veiled and disguised.  He whose task and practice it is to investigate souls, will avail himself of many varieties of this very art to determine the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable, innate order of rank to which it belongs:  he will test it by its instinct for reverence.  Difference ENGENDRE Haine:  the vulgarity of many a nature spurts up suddenly like dirty water, when any holy vessel, any jewel from closed shrines, any book bearing the marks of great destiny, is brought before it; while on the other hand, there is an involuntary silence, a hesitation of the eye, a cessation of all gestures, by which it is indicated that a soul feels the nearness of what is worthiest of respect.  The way in which, on the whole, the reverence for the Bible has hitherto been maintained in Europe, is perhaps the best example of discipline and refinement of manners which Europe owes to Christianity:  books of such profoundness and supreme significance require for their protection an external tyranny of authority, in order to acquire the period of thousands of years which is necessary to exhaust and unriddle them.  Much has been achieved when the sentiment has been at last instilled into the masses (the shallow-pates and the boobies of every kind) that they are not allowed to touch everything, that there are holy experiences before which they must take off their shoes and keep away the unclean hand—­it is almost their highest advance towards humanity.  On the contrary, in the so-called cultured classes, the believers in “modern ideas,” nothing is perhaps so repulsive as their lack of shame, the easy insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, taste, and finger everything; and it is possible that even yet there is more relative nobility of taste, and more tact for reverence among the people, among the lower classes of the people, especially among peasants, than among the newspaper-reading demimonde of intellect, the cultured class.

264.  It cannot be effaced from a man’s soul what his ancestors have preferably and most constantly done:  whether they were perhaps diligent economizers attached to a desk and a cash-box, modest and citizen-like in their desires, modest also in their virtues; or whether they were accustomed to commanding from morning till night, fond of rude pleasures and probably of still ruder duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, at one time or another, they have sacrificed old privileges of birth and possession, in order to live wholly for their faith—­for their “God,”—­as men of an inexorable and sensitive conscience, which blushes at every compromise.  It is quite impossible for a man not to have the qualities and predilections of his parents and ancestors in his constitution, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary.  This is the problem of race.  Granted that one