Instruction and history, you see, are the great enemies of religion,
disfigured by the imperfections of humanity. . . . I once had faith.
But when I came to know something, as soon as I began to reason, which
happened early, at the age of thirteen, my faith staggered and became
uncertain."[8]

This double personal conviction is in the back-ground of his thinking,
when he drafted the Concordat:

"It will be said that I am a papist.[9] I am nothing. In Egypt I was
a Moslem; here I shall be a Catholic, for the good of the people. I do
not believe in religions. The idea of a God!" (And then, pointing
upward:) "Who made all that?"

Imagination has already decorated this great name with its legends.
Let us content ourselves with those already existing; "the
restlessness of man" is such that he cannot do without them; in
default of those already made he would fashion others, haphazard, and
still more strange. The positive religions keep man from going astray;
it is these which render the supernatural definite and precise;[10]
"he had better catch it there than pick it up at Mademoiselle
Lenormand's, or with some fortune-teller or a passing charlatan." An
established religion

"is a kind of vaccination which, in satisfying our love of the
marvelous, protects us against quacks and sorcerers;[11]the priests
are far better than the Cagliostros, Kants, and the rest of the German
mystics."

In sum illuminism and metaphysics,[12] speculative inventions of the