a_ of the
theologians enabled me to attain liberty of thought. The thorough
good faith of the ancient ecclesiastical teaching consisted in not
dissimulating the force of any objection, and as the answers were
generally very weak, a clever person could work out the truth for
himself.

I learnt much, too, from the course of lectures on history. Abbe
Richard[2] gave these lectures in the spirit of the modern school
and with marked ability. For some reason or other his lectures were
interrupted, and his place was taken by a tutor, who with many other
engagements on hand, merely read to us some old notes, interspersed
with extracts from modern books. Among these modern volumes, which
often formed a striking contrast with the jog-trot old notes, there
was one which produced a very singular effect upon me. Whenever he
began to read from it I was incapable of taking a single note, my
whole being seeming to thrill with intoxicating harmony. The book was
Michelet's _Histoire de France_, the passages which so affected me
being in the fifth and sixth volumes. Thus the modern age penetrated
into me as through all the fissures of a cracked cement. I had come to
Paris with a complete moral training, but ignorant to the last degree.
I had everything to learn. It was a great surprise for me when I
found that there was such a person as a serious and learned layman.
I discovered that antiquity and the Church are not everything in this
world, and especially that contemporary literature was well worthy of
attention. I ceased to look upon the death of Louis XIV. as marking
the end of the world. I became imbued with ideas and sentiments which
had no expression in antiquity or in the seventeenth century.

So the germ which was in me began to sprout. Distasteful as it was
in many respects to my nature, this education had the effect of a
chemical reagent, and stirred all the life and activity that was in
me. For the essential thing in education is not the doctrine taught,
but the arousing of the faculties. In proportion as the foundations of
my religious faith had been shaken by finding the same names applied
to things so different, so did my mind greedily swallow the new
beverage prepared for it. The world broke in upon me. Despite its
claim to be a refuge to which the stir of the outside world never
penetrated, St. Nicholas was at this period the most brilliant and
worldly house in Paris. The atmosphere of Paris--minus, let me
add, its corr