Pasteur kept his counsel in religious matters, but there is no question that he believed in God and walked in the ways of the faith he learned from his country parents. Here is what he had to say about Émile Littré, an elder scientist and, it is true, a positivist (though one who died in the Church after a later-in-life baptism): "Often have I fancied him seated by his wife, as in a picture of early Christian times; he, looking down upon earth, filled with compassion for human suffering; […] she, by every divine grandeur, uniting in one impulse and in one heart the twofold holiness which forms the aureole of the Man-God, the one proceeding from devotion to humanity, the other emanating from ardent love for the divinity: she a saint in the canonic sense of the word; he a lay saint." The ideal that Pasteur drew of Littré's home was but a mirror of his own.