the world: not because of the faith of their people being greater than elsewhere, but because of the most exalted Christian ideals having been transformed among them into men, instead of merely remaining fanciers, beginnings or faltering measures. Take Pascal, the foremost of Christians in his combination of ardour, intellect and honesty, and consider what combination was needed in his case. Take Fénelon, the perfect and charming embodiment of eccclesiastical culture in all its power: a golden middle-road which a historic writer might feel inclined to prove impossible, whereas, in reality, it was merely something extremely difficult and improbable. Take Madame de Guyon among her fellow-thinkers, the French Quietists and everything which the zealous eloquence of the apostle Paul has endeavoured to unfathom respecting the state of the most public, most boring, most quiet and enraptured semi-divinity of the Christian, has become truth in her and, owing to a true old French naïveté in words and gestures, at once feminine, fine and noble, stripped of that Jewish aggressiveness which Paul showed towards God. Take the founder of the Trappist monasteries, the last person that was genuinely in earnest about the ascetic ideal, not as an exception among Frenchman, but as a typical Frenchman: for up to this day his gloomy creation has been able to remain indigenous and effective only among the French; it followed them into Alsace and Algeria. Let us not forget the Huguenots: the combination of a warlike
