tain an immense respect
for his wealth and genius, Father Hebronius, unanimously elected prior,
gives himself up to further studies, and leaves his monks to themselves.
Industrious and sober as they were, originally, they grow quickly
intemperate and idle; and Hebronius, who does not appear among his flock
until he has freed himself of the Catholic religion, as he has of the
Jewish and the Protestant, sees, with dismay, the evil condition of
his disciples, and regrets, too late, the precipitancy by which he
renounced, then and for ever, Christianity. "But, as he had no new
religion to adopt in its place, and as, grown more prudent and calm, he
did not wish to accuse himself unnecessarily, once more, of inconstancy
and apostasy, he still maintained all the exterior forms of the worship
which inwardly he had abjured. But it was not enough for him to have
quitted error, it was necessary to discover truth. But Hebronius had
well looked round to discover it; he could not find anything that
resembled it. Then commenced for him a series of sufferings, unknown
and terrible. Placed face to face with doubt, this sincere and religious
spirit was frightened at its own solitude; and as it had no other desire
nor aim on earth than truth, and nothing else here below interested it,
he lived absorbed in his own sad contemplations, looked ceaselessly into
the vague that surrounded him like an ocean without bounds, and seeing
the horizon retreat and retreat as ever he wished to near it. Lost in
this immense uncertainty, he felt as if attacked by vertigo, and his
thoughts whirled within his brain. Then, fatigued with his vain
toils and hopeless endeavors, he would sink down depressed, unmanned,
life-wearied, only living in the sensation of that silent grief which he
felt and could not comprehend."

It is a pity that this hapless Spiridion, so eager in his passage
from one creed to another, and so loud in his profession of the truth,
wherever he fancied that he had found it, had not waited a little,
before he avowed himself either Catholic or Protestant, and implicated
others in errors and follies which might, at least, have been confined
to his own bosom, and there have lain comparatively harmless. In what a
pretty state, for instance, will Messrs. Dr--d and P--l have left
their Newman Street congregation, who are still plunged in their old
superstitions, from which their spiritual pastors and masters have been
set free! In what a state, t