X INTRODUCTION

historian, rejecting ail supematural intervention and seeking behind ail phenomena only natural and explicable causes. Under pressure of this searching eriticism, Christianity disengages as its final residue a refined moral idealism — the ''morality touched with émotion " which constituted Matthew Amold's définition of religion. This continuation of the work of the eighteenth century is thus camed on with a sympathetic religions spirit so plausible that to more than one devout reader Renan seems bent only on reverently preserving ail that still remains vital of Christianity; everything of the mediaeval Catholicism he had discarded seems still to remain standing — except its dogmas. This persistence of the poetry of religion, after its more solid ingrédients hâve evaporated, has led to the felicitous comparison of Renan to a cathédrale désaffectée^ which, though its silence echoes no message, still retains the atmosphère of awe, the mystery and the poetry of the infinité.

Aside from its philosophical and historical importance, Renan's work attracts quite as much by its artistic qualities. The austerity which he expelled from his philosophy took refuge in his style. Color, harmony, sentiment, pervading charm, most of those qualities which Chateaubriand and the romanticists sought to graft upon or substitute for the cold perfection of seventeenth-century prose, ail thèse Renan possesses, but the chaste perfection of the older style survives in him as it does in