It is eminently the ideal of France; it was hers. Her religion connected
itself with this ideal. In the convent where she was brought up, she had
in youth had an awakening of fervent mystical piety in the Catholic
form. That form she could not keep. Popular religion of all kinds, with
its deep internal impossibilities, its "heaven and hell serving to cover
the illogical manifestations of the Divinity's apparent designs
respecting us," its "God made in our image, silly and malicious, vain
and puerile, irritable or tender, after our fashion," lost all sort of
hold upon her:--
"Communion with such a God is impossible to me, I confess it. He is
wiped out from my memory: there is no corner where I can find him any
more. Nor do I find such a God out of doors either; he is not in the
fields and waters, he is not in the starry sky. No, nor yet in the
churches where men bow themselves; it is an extinct message, a dead
letter, a thought that has done its day. Nothing of this belief, nothing
of this God, subsists in me any longer.
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