第 103 页

Catholicism swept away from his mind, but all his religious conceptions,

every hypothesis of the divine tottered and fell. Only that little school

book, nothing but the universal desire for knowledge, that education

which ever extends and penetrates the whole people, and behold the

mysteries became absurdities, the dogmas crumbled, and nothing of ancient

faith was left. A nation nourished upon Science, no longer believing in

mysteries and dogmas, in a compensatory system of reward and punishment,

is a nation whose faith is for ever dead: and without faith Catholicism

cannot be. Therein is the blade of the knife, the knife which falls and

severs. If one century, if two centuries be needed, Science will take

them. She alone is eternal. It is pure _naivete_ to say that reason is

not contrary to faith. The truth is, that now already in order to save

mere fragments of the sacred writings, it has been necessary to

accommodate them to the new certainties, by taking refuge in the

assertion that they are simply symbolical! And what an extraordinary

attitude is that of the Catholic Church, expressly forbidding all those

who may discover a truth contrary to the sacred writings to pronounce

upon it in definitive fashion, and ordering them to await events in the

conviction that this truth will some day be proved an error! Only the

Pope, says the Church, is infallible; Science is fallible, her constant

groping is exploited against her, and divines remain on the watch

striving to make it appear that her discoveries of to-day are in

contradiction with her discoveries of yesterday. What do her sacrilegious

assertions, what do her certainties rending dogma asunder, matter to a

Catholic since it is certain that at the end of time, she, Science, will

again join Faith, and become the latter's very humble slave! Voluntary

blindness and impudent denial of things as evident as the sunlight, can

no further go. But all the same the insignificant little book, the manual

of truth travels on continuing its work, destroying error and building up

the new world, even as the infinitesimal agents of life built up our

present continents.

In the sudden great enlightenment which had come on him Pierre at last

felt himself upon firm ground. Has Science ever retreated? It is

Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be

forced to retreat. Never does Science stop, step by step she wrests truth

from error, and to say that she is bankrupt because she cannot explain

the world in one word and at one effort, is pure and simple nonsense. If

she leaves, and no doubt will always leave a smaller and smaller domain

to mystery, and if supposition may always strive to explain that mystery,

it is none the less certain that she ruins, and with each successive hour

will add to the ruin of the ancient hypotheses, those which crumble away

before the acquired truths. And Catholicism is in the position of those

ancient hypotheses, and will be in it yet more thoroughly to-morrow. Like

all religions it is, at the bottom, but an explanation of the world, a

superior social and political code, intended to bring about the greatest

possible sum of peace and happiness on earth. This code which embraces

the universality of things thenceforth becomes human, and mortal like

everything that is human. One cannot put it on one side and say that it

exists on one side by itself, whilst Science does the same on the other.

Science is total and has already shown Catholicism that such is the case,

and will show it again and again by compelling it to repair the breaches

incessantly effected in its ramparts till the day of victory shall come

with the final assault of resplendent truth. Frankly, it makes one laugh

to hear people assign a _role_ to Science, forbid her to enter such and

such a domain, predict to her that she shall go no further, and declare

that at this end of the century she is already so weary that she

abdicates! Oh! you little men of shallow or distorted brains, you

politicians planning expedients, you dogmatics at bay, you authoritarians

so obstinately clinging to the ancient dreams, Science will pass on, and

sweep you all away like withered leaves!

Pierre continued glancing through the humble little book, listening to

all it told him of sovereign Science. She cannot become bankrupt, for she

does not promise the absolute, she is simply the progressive conquest of

truth. Never has she pretended that she could give the whole truth at one

effort, that sort of edifice being precisely the work of metaphysics, of

revelation, of faith. The _role_ of Science, on the contrary, is only to

destroy error as she gradually advances and increases enlightenment. And

thus, far from becoming bankrupt, in her march which nothing stops, she

remains the only possible truth for well-balanced and healthy minds. As

for those whom she does not satisfy, who crave for immediate and

universal knowledge, they have the resource of seeking refuge in no

matter what religious hypothesis, provided, if they wish to appear in the

right, that they build their fancy upon acquired certainties. Everything

which is raised on proven error falls. However, although religious

feeling persists among mankind, although the need of religion may be

eternal, it by no means follows that Catholicism is eternal, for it is,

after all, but one form of religion, which other forms preceded and which

others will follow. Religions may disappear, but religious feeling will

create new ones even with the help of Science. Pierre thought of that

alleged repulse of Science by the present-day awakening of mysticism, the

causes of which he had indicated in his book: the discredit into which

the idea of liberty has fallen among the people, duped in the last social

reorganisation, and the uneasiness of the _elite_, in despair at the void

in which their liberated minds and enlarged intelligences have left them.

It is the anguish of the Unknown springing up again; but it is also only

a natural and momentary reaction after so much labour, on finding that

Science does not yet calm our thirst for justice, our desire for

security, or our ancient idea of an eternal after-life of enjoyment. In

order, however, that Catholicism might be born anew, as some seem to

think it will be, the social soil would have to change, and it cannot

change; it no longer possesses the sap needful for the renewal of a

decaying formula which schools and laboratories destroy more and more

each day. The ground is other than it once was, a different oak must

spring from it. May Science therefore have her religion, for such a

religion will soon be the only one possible for the coming democracies,

for the nations, whose knowledge ever increases whilst their Catholic

faith is already nought but dust.

And all at once, by way of conclusion, Pierre bethought himself of the

idiocy of the Congregation of the Index. It had condemned his book, and

would surely condemn the other one that he had thought of, should he ever

write it. A fine piece of work truly! To fall tooth and nail on the poor

books of an enthusiastic dreamer, in which chimera contended with

chimera! Yet the Congregation was so foolish as not to interdict that

little book which he held in his hands, that humble book which alone was

to be feared, which was the ever triumphant enemy that would surely

overthrow the Church. Modest it was in its cheap "get up" as a school

manual, but that did not matter: danger began with the very alphabet,

increased as knowledge was acquired, and burst forth with those _resumes_

of the physical, chemical, and natural sciences which bring the very

Creation, as described by Holy Writ, into question. However, the Index

dared not attempt to suppress those humble volumes, those terrible

soldiers of truth, those destroyers of faith. What was the use, then, of

all the money which Leo XIII drew from his hidden treasure of the Peter's

Pence to subvention Catholic schools, with the thought of forming the

believing generations which the papacy needed to enable it to conquer?

What was the use of that precious money if it was only to serve for the

purchase of similar insignificant yet formidable volumes, which could

never be sufficiently "cooked" and expurgated, but would always contain

too much Science, that growing Science which one day would blow up both

Vatican and St. Peter's? Ah! that idiotic and impotent Index, what

wretchedness and what derision!

Then, when Pierre had placed Theophile Morin's book in his valise, he

once more returned to the window, and while leaning out, beheld an

extraordinary vision. Under the cloudy, coppery sky, in the mild and

mournful night, patches of wavy mist had risen, hiding many of the

house-roofs with trailing shreds which looked like shrouds. Entire

edifices had disappeared, and he imagined that the times were at last

accomplished, and that truth had at last destroyed St. Peter's dome. In a

hundred or a thousand years, it would be like that, fallen, obliterated

from the black sky. One day, already, he had felt it tottering and

cracking beneath him, and had foreseen that this temple of Catholicism

would fall even as Jove's temple had fallen on the Capitol. And it was

over now, the dome had strewn the ground with fragments, and all that

remained standing, in addition to a portion of the apse, where five

columns of the central nave, still upholding a shred of entablature, and

four cyclopean buttress-piers on which the dome had rested--piers which

still arose, isolated and superb, looking indestructible among all the

surrounding downfall. But a denser mist flowed past, another thousand

years no doubt went by, and then nothing whatever remained. The apse, the

last pillars, the giant piers themselves were felled! The wind had swept

away their dust, and it would have been necessary to search the soil

beneath the brambles and the nettles to find a few fragments of broken

statues, marbles with mutilated inscriptions, on the sense of which

learned men were unable to agree. And, as formerly, on the Capitol, among

the buried remnants of Jupiter's temple, goats strayed and climbed

through the solitude, browsing upon the bushes, amidst the deep silence

of the oppressive summer sunlight, which only the buzzing flies

disturbed.

Then, only then, did Pierre feel the supreme collapse within him. It was

really all over, Science was victorious, nothing of the old world

remained. What use would it be then to become the great schismatic, the

reformer who was awaited? Would it not simply mean the building up of a

new dream? Only the eternal struggle of Science against the Unknown, the

searching, pursuing inquiry which incessantly moderated man's thirst for

the divine, now seemed to him of import, leaving him waiting to know if

she would ever triumph so completely as to suffice mankind, by satisfying

all its wants. And in the disaster which had overcome his apostolic

enthusiasm, in presence of all those ruins, having lost his faith, and

even his hope of utilising old Catholicism for social and moral

salvation, there only remained reason that held him up. She had at one

moment given way. If he had dreamt that book, and had just passed through

that terrible crisis, it was because sentiment had once again overcome

reason within him. It was his mother, so to say, who had wept in his

heart, who had filled him with an irresistible desire to relieve the

wretched and prevent the massacres which seemed near at hand; and his

passion for charity had thus swept aside the scruples of his

intelligence. But it was his father's voice that he now heard, lofty and

bitter reason which, though it had fled, at present came back in all

sovereignty. As he had done already after Lourdes, he protested against

the glorification of the absurd and the downfall of common sense. Reason

alone enabled him to walk erect and firm among the remnants of the old

beliefs, even amidst the obscurities and failures of Science. Ah! Reason,

it was through her alone that he suffered, through her alone that he

could content himself, and he swore that he would now always seek to

satisfy her, even if in doing so he should lose his happiness.

At that moment it would have been vain for him to ask what he ought to

do. Everything remained in suspense, the world stretched before him still

littered with the ruins of the past, of which, to-morrow, it would

perhaps be rid. Yonder, in that dolorous faubourg of Paris, he would find

good Abbe Rose, who but a few days previously had written begging him to

return and tend, love, and save his poor, since Rome, so dazzling from

afar, was dead to charity. And around the good and peaceful old priest he

would find the ever growing flock of wretched ones; the little fledglings

who had fallen from their nests, and whom he found pale with hunger and

shivering with cold; the households of abominable misery in which the

father drank and the mother became a prostitute, while the sons and the

daughters sank into vice and crime; the dwellings, too, through which

famine swept, where all was filth and shameful promiscuity, where there

was neither furniture nor linen, nothing but purely animal life. And then

there would also come the cold blasts of winter, the disasters of slack

times, the hurricanes of consumption carrying off the weak, whilst the

strong clenched their fists and dreamt of vengeance. One evening, too,

perhaps, he might again enter some room of horror and find that another

mother had killed herself and her five little ones, her last-born in her

arms clinging to her drained breast, and the others scattered over the

bare tiles, at last contented, feeling hunger no more, now that they were

dead! But no, no, such awful things were no longer possible: such black

misery conducting to suicide in the heart of that great city of Paris,

which is brimful of wealth, intoxicated with enjoyment, and flings

millions out of window for mere pleasure! The very foundations of the

social edifice were rotten; all would soon collapse amidst mire and

blood. Never before had Pierre so acutely realised the derisive futility