moyen age," and on the march of
modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said
that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of
storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and
seriousness--some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up,
not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly
seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness
and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the
problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the
Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the
supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light
on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.

The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of
many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever
studious boy, a true son of old Brittany--the most melancholy, the most
tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French
provinces, but of all regions in Europe--is passed on from the teaching
of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central
seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He
comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge,
full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished
literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was
the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he passed under the more
strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the
preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific
theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he
showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was
assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, "the most remarkable person," in
his opinion, "whom the French clergy has produced in our days," a
"savant and a saint," who had mastered the results of German criticism
as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all
this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this
knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring
from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology,
carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on
the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German
school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two a