"An epitaph, Monsieur, not only on yourself, but on your office."
"Perhaps," answered Leo. "We do not know. The dead know so little of what is taking place on Earth."
"On the contrary," said Renan, "voyagers from the Earth are constantly arriving, and we are kept well advised."
"I can imagine a moderately successful issue to my policy if my successor should be a man of tact. Even if institutions be only the monuments of an idea, men must build them; and, in spite of your argument, I think a period of authority, at least of a more correct balance between authority and liberty, is setting in. I have still hoped for the papacy. Comtism, some one said, was Catholicism with Christianity left out. The qualifying clause is perhaps unnecessary. Comtism, socialism, internationalism, are all 'Catholic' ideas. To the Church the name of a nation is merely a geographical expression, it knows no frontiers, no distinctions of race or language, it has no preference for any form of government, being superior to all. The Latin language is for it, a universal tongue, which no sane person could consider inferior to Volapuk or Esperanto. The Church, properly constituted, might draw into itself a great deal of this floating idealism. We might approximate our ideals. You would say, Monsieur, that we were all equally reactionary."
"All synthetic ideas are," said Renan. "Anarchism is in its essence more truly progressive than socialism, because it is for the individual. Socialism implies either that all men are made after the same pattern, that in certain circumstances they will act in a certain manner, or that external influences, education, and environment, will turn out a uniform model. It is an error. If education were all-important, the Church would not have lost ground consistently in Catholic Europe, where the Jesuits have had practically the whole of education in their hands for two centuries. If such a machine as the society has failed, though it was backed by the State, and spoke with a quasi-spiritual authority, one cannot imagine a State department succeeding. Liberty is the condition of development, and education develops, it does not create."
"It is important, however, to control the means of development," answered Leo. "Of course our education would be modern."