hich we are unable to answer,

"drive us onward to religion; we rush forward to welcome her, for
that is our natural tendency. But knowledge comes and we stop short.
Instruction and history, you see, are the great enemies of religion,
disfigured by the imperfections of humanity.... I once had faith. But
when I came to know something, as soon as I began to reason, which
happened early, at the age of thirteen, my faith staggered and became
uncertain."[5108]

This double personal conviction is in the back-ground of his thinking,
when he drafted the Concordat:

"It will be said that I am a papist.[5109] I am nothing. In Egypt I was
a Moslem; here I shall be a Catholic, for the good of the people. I
do not believe in religions. The idea of a God!" (And then, pointing
upward:) "Who made all that?"

Imagination has already decorated this great name with its legends. Let
us content ourselves with those already existing; "the restlessness of
man" is such that he cannot do without them; in default of those already
made he would fashion others, haphazard, and still more strange. The
positive religions keep man from going astray; it is these which render
the supernatural definite and precise;[5110] "he had better catch
it there than pick it up at Mademoiselle Lenormand's, or with some
fortune-teller or a passing charlatan." An established religion

"is a kind of vaccination which, in satisfying our love of the
marvelous, protects us against quacks and sorcerers;[5111] the priests
are far better than the Cagliostros, Kants, and the rest of the German
mystics."

In sum illuminism and metaphysics,[5112] speculative inventions of the
brain or of a contagious overexcitement of the nervous system, all these
illusions of gullible men, are basically unhealthy, and, in general,
anti-social. Nevertheless, since they are part of human nature, let us
accept them like so many streams tumbling down a slope, but on condition
that they remain in their own beds and that they have many but no new
ones and never one bed alone for itself.

"I do not want a dominant religion, nor the establishment of new
ones. The Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran systems, established by the
Concordat, are sufficient."[5113]

Their direction and force are intelligible, and their irruptions can be
guarded against. Moreover, the present inclinations and configurations
of the human soil favor them; the child follows the road marked out by
the parent, and the man