THE EQUINOX
who have broken down dogma, and are trying always to fill
the void with reasonings, like the sieve of the Danaides;
these weavers of religious fantasy, all of whose innovations
are negative, who have formulated for their own use an
unknown calling itself better known, mysteries better
explained, a more defined infinite, a more restrained immen-
sity, a more doubting faith, those who have quintessentialized
the absurd, divided charity, and taken acts of anarchy for the
principles of an entirely impossible hierarchy; those men
who wish to realize salvation by faith alone, because charity
escapes them, and who can no longer realize it, even upon the
earth, for their. pretended sacraments are no longer anything
but allegorical mummeries; they no longer give grace; they
no longer make God seen and touched; they are no longer,
in a word, the signs of the almighty power of faith, but the
compelled witnesses of the eternal impotence of doubt.
It is, then, against faith itself that the Reformation pro-
tested! Protestants were right only in their protest against
the inconsiderate and persecuting zeal which wished to force
consciences. They claimed the right to doubt, the right to
have less religion than others, or even to have none at all;
they have shed their blood for that sad privilege; they
conquered it, they possess it; but they will not take away
from us that of pitying them, and loving them. When the
need to believe again takes them, when their heart revolts
against the tyranny of a falsified reason, when they become
tired of the empty abstractions of their arbitrary dogma, of
the vague observances of their ineffective worship; when their
communion without the real presence, their churches without
divinity, and their morality without grace finally frighten
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