And afterwards, again
yielding to the need of loving whilst yet allowing reason, so hard to
satisfy, her share in his intellect, he had staked his final peace on a
second experiment, and had gone to Rome to see if Catholicism could there
be renewed, could revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity and
become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world,
upheaving and in danger of death, was awaiting in order to calm down and
live. And he had found there naught but ruins, the rotted trunk of a tree
that could never put forth another springtide; and he had heard there
naught but the supreme rending of the old social edifice, near to its
fall. Then it was, that, relapsing into boundless doubt, total negation,
he had been recalled to Paris by Abbe Rose, in the name of their poor,
and had returned thither that he might forget and immolate himself and
believe in them--the poor--since they and their frightful sufferings
alone remained certain. And then it was too, that for three years he came
into contact with that collapse, that very bankruptcy of goodness itself:
charity a derision, charity useless and flouted.
Those three years had been lived by Pierre amidst ever-growing torments,
in which his whole being had ended by sinking. His faith was forever
dead; dead, too, even his hope of utilising the faith of the multitudes
for the general salvation.
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