"For any new readings of life, for any renaissance of art and religion, we must look to the simple folk, who are still close to the breasts of Earth: the folk who of old imagined Apollo as a herd in the service of Admetus; who found Demeter sitting by the well, and comforted her; who, after the vintage had been gathered in, took down the grotesque masks, which they had hung upon the vines to scare the birds and foxes from the grapes, and acted in them, singing the hymns of Dionysos to the music of pipes and flutes. Poetry, religion, love, the three things which quicken life to new effort, are never far from the soil. The great conventional middle-classes, even those heretics from Philistia, the followers of Comte and Marx, the mediocre intelligences whose political principles are communist, and whose religious principles are positivist, these have little influence on the future. Socialism differs from all previous Utopian dreams simply because it lacks their vital energy; it is material and mechanical where the older ideas were spiritual and natural; it is lacking in a sense of morality, in a sense of beauty, in a sense of truth. You will not find the conscience of humanity in any of these creeds."
"It seems," said Leo, "that we do not know where we are going."
"You have said that human institutions are only waiting for their transformation," Renan replied. "An institution represents a need. It has been formed by the spontaneous action of the community; but the moment it has been thus constituted it becomes fixed, and ceases to represent the living, developing forces which deposited it. Christianity at first was perfectly fluid; the teaching of Paul was unsystematic, local, momentary; but Christianity became a religion, not of inspiration but of authority, it crystallised into an hierarchy and perished. In the same way the idyll of St Francis and his companions crystallised into an order, and perished. They exist among us as monuments, these institutions; but the same forces which crystallised them are now dissolving them; the moment they cut themselves off from the stream of life they perished. I do not think that the future will differ essentially from the past. Socialism is simply the cry of the poor against the rich. Dives is well-clad and fares sumptuously every day; no other crime is alleged against him, but these are sufficient to ensure his damnation. Perhaps the maker of the parable saw some peculiar virtue in poverty and suffering, which filled the heart with a spiritual grace, and uplifted it with moral fortitude. Perhaps he saw the wealth of Dives as poverty, as a lack of spiritual experience.