ccents; I should, if I followed the
bent of my inclination, pass hours at a time in church; gentle, plain,
and pure piety touches me to the very heart; and I even have sharp
relapses of devotional feeling. All this cannot coexist without
contradiction with my general condition. But I have once for all made
up my mind on the subject; I have cast off the inconvenient yoke
of consistency, at all events for the time. Will God condemn me for
having simultaneously admitted that which my different faculties
simultaneously exact, although I am unable to reconcile their
contradictory demands? Are there not periods in the history of the
human mind when contradiction is necessary? When the moral verities
are under examination, doubt is unavoidable; and yet during this
period of transition the pure and noble mind must still be moral,
thanks to a contradiction. Thus it is that I am at times both Catholic
and Rationalist; but holy orders I can never take, for 'once a priest,
always a priest.'

"In order to keep my letter within due limits, I must bring the long
story of my inward struggles to a close. I thank God, who has seen
fit to put me through so severe a trial, for having brought me into
contact with a mind such as yours, which is so well able to understand
this trial, and to whom I can confide it without reserve."

M---- wrote me a very kind-hearted reply, offering a merely formal
opposition to my project of following my own course of study. My
sister, whose high intelligence had for years been like the pillar of
fire which lighted my path, wrote from Poland to encourage me in my
resolution, which was finally taken at the end of September. It was
a very honest and straightforward act; and it is one which I now look
back upon with the greatest satisfaction. But what a cruel severance.
It was upon my mother's account that I suffered the most. I was
compelled to inflict a deep wound upon her without being able to
give the slightest explanation. Although gifted with much native
intelligence, she was not sufficiently educated to understand that
a person's religious faith can be affected because he has discovered
that the Messianic explanations of the Psalms are erroneous, and that
Gesenius, in his commentary upon Isaiah, is in nearly every point
right when combating the arguments of the orthodox. It grieved me
much, also, to give pain to my old Brittany masters, who retained such
kindly feelings towards me. The critical question,