There is still probably more bitterness in France than in
any other country under the sun on the subject of religious differences. A curious illustration of this occurred the other day, when Madame de Gasparin sent to a popular library in Boussenois, in the Cote d'Or, a copy of her late husband's work on " The Schools of Doubt and the Schools of Faith." M. de Gasparin was a dis- tinguished Protestant, and the directors of the library of Boussenois appear to be rigid Roman Catholics. They burned the volume, and thanked Madame de Gasparin, in a letter meant to be one of severe irony, for her goodness in warming them at a fire made on the fuel of her husband's pages. In England a genuine Catholic would probably have welcomed, and certainly accepted courteously, any book written on the side of faith and against the Sceptics. But in France the old internecine war prevails. No doubt the director of the Boussenois library, M. de Geroal, thinks that M. de Gasparin must have been wicked, if only because he was a Protestant, or he would never have sent such a letter as he did to a widow making a present of her late husband's work. The capacity of dogma to bewitch the mind which it gets full hold of, into absolutely fictitious imaginings as to the relation between truth and goodness, is one of the strangest of its many strange powers.
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