data I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the States
within a year of the book's publication. In England, an edition of 5,000
copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volume
edition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in the
sixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into most
foreign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book.
Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetiere, the well-known
editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ and leader--in some sort--of the
Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for the
appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in
his _Revue_. "But how," I asked him (we were sitting in his editor's
sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l'Universite), "could it
possibly suit you, or the _Revue_, to do anything of the kind? And
_now_--after fifteen years?"

But, according to him, the case was simple. When the book first
appeared, the public of the _Revue_ could not have felt any interest in
it. France is a logical country--a country of clear-cut solutions. And
at that time either one was a Catholic or a free thinker. And if one was
a Catholic, one accepted from the Church, say, the date of the Book of
Daniel, as well as everything else. Renan, indeed, left the Church
thirty years earlier because he came to see with certainty that the Book
of Daniel was written under Antiochus Epiphanes, and not when his
teachers at St. Sulpice said it was written. But while the secular world
listened and applauded, the literary argument against dogma made very
little impression on the general Catholic world for many years.

But now [said M. Brunetiere] everything is different. Modernism has
arisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in
the streets. And _Robert Elsmere_ is a study in Modernism--or at any