In the preface to the same book, M. de Lamennais had already said—
"That France and Europe are marching towards fresh revolutions is now apparent to everybody. The most undaunted hopes which have fed themselves for long on interest or stupidity give way before the evidence of facts, in the face of which it is no longer possible for anyone to delude himself. Nothing can remain as it is, everything is unsettled, totters towards a change. Conturbatœ sunt gentes et inclinata sunt regna."
We underline nothing in this second paragraph because we should have to underline the whole. Let us pass on to the last words of the book—
"The time is coming when it will be said to those who are in darkness: 'Behold the light!' And they will arise, and, with gaze fixed on that divine radiance will, with repentance and surprise, yet filled with joy, worship that spirit which restores all disorder, reveals all truth, enlightens every intelligence: oriens ex alto."
The above expressions are those of a prophet as well as of a poet; they reveal what neither the Guizots, the Molés, the Broglies, nor even the Casimir Périers saw, nor, indeed, any of those we are accustomed to style statesmen foresaw.
In this work M. de Lamennais appealed solemnly "for the alliance of Catholics with all sincere Liberal spirits." This book is really in some measure the hinge on which turned the gate through which M. de Lamennais passed from his first political phase to the second.
M. de Lamennais was born at St. Malo, in the house next to that in which Chateaubriand was born, and a few yards only from that in which Broussais came into the world. So that the old peaceful town gave us, in less than fifteen years, Chateaubriand, Broussais and Lamennais, names representative of the better part of the poetry, science and philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century. M. de Lamennais had, like Chateaubriand, passed his childhood by the sea, had listened to the roar of the ocean, watching the waves which are lost to sight on infinite horizons, eternally returning to break against the cliffs, as the human wave returns to break itself against invincible necessity. He preserved, I recollect (for one feature in my existence coincided with that of the author of Paroles d'un Croyant), he preserved, I repeat, from his earliest childhood, the vivid and clear recollections which he connected with the grand and rugged scenery of his beloved Brittany.
"I can still hear," he said to us, at a dinner where the principal guests were himself, the Abbé Lacordaire, M. de Montalembert, Listz and myself—"the cry of certain sea-birds which passed barking over my head. Some of those rocks, which have looked down pityingly for numberless centuries upon the angry impotent waves which perish at their feet, are stocked with ancient legends."
M. de Lamennais related one of these in his une Voix de prison. It is that of a maiden who, overtaken by the tide, on a reef of rocks, tied her hair to the stems of sea-weeds to keep herself from being washed off by the motion of the waves, far away from her native land.
M. de Lamennais's youth was stormy and undisciplined. He loved physical exercises, hunting, fencing, racing and riding; strange tastes these, as preparation for an ecclesiastical career! But it was not from personal inclination or of his own impulse that he entered the priesthood, but by compulsion from the noble families in the district. On his part, the bishop of the diocese discerned in the young man a superior intellect, a lofty character, a tendency towards meditation and thoughtfulness, and drew him to himself by all kinds of seductions. They spared him the trials of an ecclesiastical seminary, at which his intractable disposition might have rebelled; but, priest though he was, M. de Lamennais did not discontinue to ride the most fiery horses of the town, or to practise shooting. It was the Empire, that régime of glory and of despotism, which wounded the sensitive nerves of the young priest of stern spirit and Royalist sympathies. Brittany remembered her exiled princes, and the family of M. de Lamennais was among those which faithfully preserved the worship of the past; not that their family was of ancient nobility: the head of the house was a shipowner who had made his wealth by distant voyages, and who was ennobled at the close of the last century for services rendered to the town of St. Malo. The Empire fell, and M. de Lamennais, casting a bird's-eye view over that stupendous ruin, wrote in 1815—