writing to Madame
Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words: "You are right; we
must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with
him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his
sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than
that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on
the yonder side of the _black hole_. But for the ancients this black
hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged
against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and
Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a
unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this
grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which
he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt
enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30]

Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what
is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there is also an
anti-theological advocacy, and an _odium anti-theologicum_.

Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call
themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.

The rationalist acts rationally--that is to say, he does not speak out
of his part--so long as he confines himself to denying that reason
satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being
able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the
_odium anti-theologicum_, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people
who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words
of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when
Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the
persecution of the faith--a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that
of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by
mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies."

The anti-theological hate, the scientificist--I do not say
scientific--fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more detached
scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics
of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of
faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the
Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of
Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor ye