Those people who had broken with the Papacy, turning their backs for ever on Rome, were far happier and more prosperous than that Spain, which slept like a beggar at the door of the Church.
At this period of his intellectual development Gabriel had an ideal, and often of an evening he would leave his work to go and listen to him for an hour at the College of France: this was Ernest Renan; Gabriel admired him for a double reason, for his talent and for his history.

The great man had also passed through a seminary, and even now had a priestly look as though he had suffered deeply from the pressure of the ecclesiastical yoke; he was a rebel, and Gabriel felt as though he belonged to his own family.

"Truly the hammers to destroy the temple are forged within the temple," and the law fatal to all religions was being accomplished, when faith vanishes, and the multitude no longer feel the fervour of early days.
Gabriel was astonished to hear how the teacher could penetrate the intellectual development of the Hebrew people, which had served as the basis of Christianity, as he heard him demolish bit by bit the immense altarpiece, before which humanity had knelt for over nineteen centuries.

The Spanish seminarist revolted against his old faith with all the impetuosity of his vehement temperament.

How could he have believed all that and have considered it the height of human wisdom! Certainly Christianity had exercised a beneficial influence at one period of the infancy of humanity, it had filled men's lives in the Middle Ages when there was little to think of beyond religion, and, in a land desolated by strife, there was no other refuge for intellectual thought but the cathedral in the towns and the monastery in the country.