There was only one true learning in the world, and that was theology.

The other sciences were only toys, only fit to amuse the eternal infancy of humanity.

To know God and to meditate on the greatness of His power, this was the only serious study to which men could devote themselves; machinery, the discoveries of the positive sciences, in fact everything which did not treat of divinity and the future life, was only a bagatelle for the amusement of fools and people of no faith.
The former seminarist, who from his earliest childhood had despised all human progress, was stupefied when he perceived how earnestly all French Catholicism spoke of it.

In correcting the proofs of so many religious works he could not but notice the profound respect which this despised science inspired in the good French priests, men of such far superior culture to that of the canons down there.

And moreover he noticed a certain humble shrinking in the representatives of religion when they came face to face with science--a desire to please, not to be censorious, to help on with their sympathy any conciliatory solutions, so that dogma should not fall to the ground, finding no place in the rapid march of events that was hurrying humanity into the future with the whirl of its new discoveries.