One hundred thousand, two hundred thousand pilgrims at Lourdes each year,
that was, after all, but a grain of sand. It was the people, the whole
people, that was required. But the people has forever deserted the
churches, it no longer puts any soul in the Blessed Virgins which it
manufactures, and nothing nowadays could restore its lost faith. A
Catholic democracy--yes, history would then begin afresh; only were it
possible to create a new Christian people, would not the advent of a new
Saviour, the mighty breath of a new Messiah, have been needed for such a
task?
However, the words still sounded, still rang out in Pierre's mind with
the growing clamour of pealing bells. A new religion; a new religion.
Doubtless it must be a religion nearer to life, giving a larger place to
the things of the world, and taking the acquired truths into due account.
And, above all, it must be a religion which was not an appetite for
death--Bernadette living solely in order that she might die, Doctor
Chassaigne aspiring to the tomb as to the only happiness--for all that
spiritualistic abandonment was so much continuous disorganisation of the
will to live. At bottom of it was hatred to life, disgust with and
cessation of action. Every religion, it is true, is but a promise of
immortality, an embellishment of the spheres beyond, an enchanted garden
to be entered on the morrow of death. Could a new religion ever place
such a garden of eternal happiness on earth? Where was the formula, the
dogma, that would satisfy the hopes of the mankind of to-day? What belief
should be sown to blossom forth in a harvest of strength and peace? How
could one fecundate the universal doubt so that it should give birth to a
new faith? and what sort of illusion, what divine falsehood of any kind
could be made to germinate in the contemporary world, ravaged as it had
been upon all sides, broken up by a century of science?
At that moment, without any apparent transition, Pierre saw the face of
his brother Guillaume arise in the troublous depths of his mind.
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