Note 430 — Chapter VI · RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (Continued)

“We,” he says, “nourished and moulded by Christianity, no longer approach the thought of divine and eternal things except with a heart full of vanity, a mind deadened and filled with the love of material things. To the instruction of Scripture, to the responses and prophecies of the Son of God, it is necessary to find (I am ashamed to say it) an academic counterpart. We have gone back to the old state of polytheism or atheism, to the maxims of antiquity.... In this paradise of study it is necessary for every lover of letters that his philosophic mind, leaving behind the pastures of philology (very pleasant, but in themselves futile and of no account for what concerns the present object), should strive to fill itself with the nutriment of sacred philosophy, the feast of heavenly wisdom descended among mortals.”