struck by the decay of religious ideas: "An immense moral, and perhaps intellectual, degeneracy will follow the disappearance of religion from the world. We, at the present day, can dispense with religion, because others have it for us. Those who do not believe are carried along by the more or less believing majority; but on the day when the majority lose this impulse, the men of spirit themselves will go feebly to the attack." It is the absence of the sentiment of sublimity which Renan dreaded; like all old people in their days of sadness, he thinks of his childhood, and adds, "Man is of value in proportion to the religious sentiment which he preserves from his first education and which colours his whole life." He himself had lived all his life under the influence of the sentiment of sublimity inculcated in him by his mother; we know, in fact, that Madame Renan was a woman of lofty character. But the source of sublimity is dried up: "Religious people live on a shadow. We live on the shadow of a shadow. On what will those who come after us live?"[1]
Renan, as was his wont, tried to mitigate the gloom of the outlook which his perspicacity presented to him; he is like many other French writers who, wishing to please a frivolous public, never dare to go to the bottom of the problems that life presents;[2] he does not wish to frighten his amiable lady admirers, so he adds, therefore, that it is not necessary to have a religion burdened with dogmas, such a religion, for example, as Christianity; the religious sentiment should suffice. Since Renan, there has been no lack of chatter about this vague religious sentiment which "should suffice" to replace the positive
- ↑ Renan, Feuilles détachées, pp. 17–18.
- ↑ Brunetière addressed this reproach to. French literature: " If you wish to know why Racine or Molière, for example, never attained the depth we find in a Shakespeare or a Goethe … cherchez la femme, and you will find that the defect is due to the influence of the salons, and of women" (Évolution des genres, 3rd edition, p. 128).
