faith.' Oh! priests, my brethren, and you, my masters, you have tried to
close my soul as we close a book, to extinguish my thought like a too
lively flame and to bend my rebellious reason; but my soul unfolds in spite
of you; the book swollen with doubts, bursts under the clasp, my thought
rekindles at the first spark, and my reason rises to its full height to
protest from the deeps of darkness where you would bury it.

"For I have followed you step by step in the tortuous ways of your dark
lives. I have listened to your words and I have seen your deeds, and the
deeds gave the lie to your words.

"Then I said to myself: Perhaps we are living in an evil period. The curse
is upon this age. And I have sought to relieve my thoughts in less gloomy
pictures. I have ransacked history to find there the golden age of
Catholicism. But the pages of Catholic history are stained with mire and
blood. The dealers of the temple, more powerful than Christ, have in their
turn driven him out of the sanctuary. Humanity, imprisoned in the round of
hypocritical conventions and nefarious laws, revolves unceasingly on
itself, the eternal Ixion fastened to the eternal wheel.

"Whither are we going? Whither are we going in the ocean of social
tempests, of political knaveries, of religious falsehoods? Centuries pass,
empires fall, nations disappear, religions, at first blazing torches, then
smoky harmful lamps, die out one by one, generations succeed generations
with hands stretched out towards the future whence the new light must
spring, and the future, gloomy gulf, will swallow up all, men and things,
worlds and gods.

"I have ransacked history and I have discovered that yesterday as to-day,
there were among those men who call themselves shepherds of souls, pride,