we speak of men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute
claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It
cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To
prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let
us leave to the chapels their statues and their relics, and far from
belittling the saints, let us make their true grandeur shine forth.

* * * * *

It is time to say a few words concerning the difficulties of the work
here presented to the public. History always embraces but a very feeble
part of the reality: ignorant, she is like the stories children tell of
the events that have occurred before their eyes; learned, she reminds us
of a museum organized with all the modern improvements. Instead of
making you see nature with its external covering, its diffuse life, its
mysterious echoes in your own heart, they offer you a herbarium.

If it is difficult to narrate an ordinary event of our own time, it is
far more so to describe the great crises where restless humanity is
seeking its true path.

The first duty of the historian is to forget his own time and country
and become the sympathetic and interested contemporary of what he
relates; but if it is difficult to give oneself the heart of a Greek or
a Roman, it is infinitely more so to give oneself a heart of the
thirteenth century. I have said that at that period the Middle Age was
twenty years old, and the feelings of the twentieth year are, if not the
most fugitive, at least the most difficult to note down. Everyone knows
that it is impossible to recall the feelings of youth with the same
clearness as those of childhood or mature age. Doubtless we may have