essed like a lugubrious doll; and in
exchange for all these sacrifices to earn less than a man who breaks
stones on the road. We live idly, certain that we shall never fall
from over-work, but our poverty is greater than that of many workmen;
we cannot acknowledge it, nor put ourselves in the way of begging
alms, for the honour of our cloth. And besides, why should they keep
us if we are of no practical use and cost the country so dear? When
the religious domination came to an end in Spain it was only we, the
lower ones, who suffered in consequence. The priest is poor, the
temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his
thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and
he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no
danger. The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy;
the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its
corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove,
and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money."

"It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains.
The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it,
forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes,
and that generation after generation pass between its death and
burial. Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen.
The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the
philosophers despised it. All the same Christianity required many
years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring
it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like
men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed
them. Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they
are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their
ceremonies to the religions that follow them. We have been born in one
of those times of transition, we are present at the death of a whole
world of beliefs. How long will the agony last? Who knows? Two
centuries? Possibly less may be wanted to crystallise in humanity a
fresh proof of its uncertainty and of its fear of the great mystery of
nature, but death is certain, inevitable. But what religion has been
eternal? The symptoms of dissolution are visible everywhere. Where is
that faith that drove those warlike multitudes to the crusades? Where
is that fervour which continued building cathed