Yet, as we have insisted, Renan had an essentially religious view of the universe, and he expressly claimed that his break with the Church and his criticism of her were due to a devotion to pure religion, and he even adds, to a loyalty to the spirit of her Founder. Although, as he remarks in his _Nouvelles Etudes religieuses_, it is true that the most modest education tends to destroy the belief in the superstitious elements in religion, it is none the less true that the very highest culture can never destroy religion in the highest sense. “Dogmas pass, but piety is eternal.” The external trappings of religion have suffered by the growth of the modern sciences of nature and of historical criticism. The mind of cultivated persons does not now present the same attitude to evidence in regard to religious doctrines which were once accepted without question. The sources of the origins of the Christian religion are themselves questionable. This, Renan says, must not discourage the believers in true religion, for that is not the kind of foundation upon which religion reposes. Dogmas in the past gave rise to divisions and quarrels, only by feeling can religious persons be united in fellowship. The most prophetic words of Jesus were, Renan points out, those in which he indicated a time when men “would not worship God in this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but when the true worshippers would worship in spirit and in truth.” It was precisely this spirit which Renan admired in Jesus, whom he considered more of a philosopher than the Church, and he reminds the “Christians”[13] who railed against him as an unbeliever that Jesus had had much more influence upon him than they gave him credit for, and, more particularly, that his break with the Church was due to loyalty to Jesus. By such loyalty Renan meant not a blind worship, but a reverence which endeavoured to appreciate and follow the ideals for which Jesus himself stood. It did not involve slavish acceptance of all he said, even if that were intelligible, and clear, which it is not. “To be a Platonist,” remarks Renan, “I need not adore Plato, or believe _all_ that he said.”[14]
[13] Renan complains of the ignorance of the clergy of Rome regarding his own work, which they did not understand because they had not read it, merely relying on the Press and other sources for false and biassed accounts.