LXVIII
It is impossible to glance through any newspaper at all, no matter of what day, what month, what year, without finding in every line the most frightful signs of human perversity, together with the most astonishing boasts of probity, of goodness, of charity, and the most shameless affirmations in regard to the progress of civilization.
Every paper, from the first line to the last, is but a tissue of horrors. War, crime, theft, lewdness, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, crimes of individuals, a universal intoxication of atrocity.
And it is with this disgusting appetizer that civilized man accompanies his every morning meal. Everything in this world sweats crime: the magazine, the wall, the face of man. I cannot see how a pure hand can touch a paper without a convulsion of disgust.
LXIX
The strength of the amulet demonstrated by philosophy. Bored coins, talismans, every one's keepsakes. Treatise on moral dynamics. Of the power of the sacraments. Of my childhood, tendency to mysticism. My conversations with God.
LXX
Of obsession. Of Possession, of Prayer and of Faith. Moral dynamics of Jesus. (Renan thinks it ridiculous to suppose that Jesus believed in the omnipotence, even materially, of Prayer and of Faith.) The sacraments are the means of this dynamics.
Of the infamy of the printing-shop, great obstacle to the development of beauty.