In his opinion, contempt was the sign by which he recognised the decline of religious feeling. The seventeenth century believed, the eighteenth denied, the nineteenth doubted.
The success of the book was immense. France, agitated by vast and conflicting problems, a Babel wherein many voices were speaking simultaneously, in every kind of tongue, the France of the Empire, of the Restoration, of Carbonarism, of Liberalism and of Republicanism, held its peace to listen to the weighty and inspired utterance of this unknown writer: "et siluit terra in conspectu ejus!" The voice came from the desert. Who had seen, who knew this man? He had dropped from the region where eagles dwell; his name was mentioned by all lips, in the same breath with that of Bossuet. L'Essai sur l'indifférence was little read but much admired; the poets—they are the only people who read—recognised in it a powerful imagination, at times almost an affrighted imagination, which, both by its excesses and its terrors, hugged, as it were, the dead body of religious belief, and shook it roughly, hoping against hope, to bring it back to life again. Of all prose-writers, Tacitus was the one whom the Abbé de Lamennais admired the most; of all poets, Dante was the one he read over and over again the most frequently; of all books, the one he knew by heart was the Bible.
Now, it might assuredly have been believed that this citadel, intended to protect the weak walls of Catholicism, L'Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, was viewed with favourable eyes by the French clergy; no such thing! Quite the contrary; a cry went up from the heart of the Church, not of joy or admiration, but of terror. They were scared by the genius of the man; religion was no longer in the habit of having an Origen, a Tertullian, or a Bossuet to defend it; it was afraid of being supported by such a defender and, little by little, the shudder of fear reached even as far as Rome; and the book was very nearly placed on the Index. These suspicions were aroused by the nature of the arguments of which the author made use to repel the attacks of philosophers. The Abbé de Lamennais foresaw, through the gloom, the causes at work undermining the old edifice of orthodoxy, and tried to put it on a wider basis of toleration and to prop it up, as he himself expressed it, by the exercise of common sense. To this end he made incredible flights into metaphysical realms, to prove that Catholicism was, and always had been, the religion of Humanity.
The Abbé de Lamennais taught in the seminaries, but his teaching was looked upon with suspicion; and young people were forbidden the reading of a work, which the outside world regarded as that of a misguided god who wanted to deny man the right of freedom of thought. No suicide was ever more heroic, never did intellect bring so much courage and logic to the task of self-destruction. But, in reality, and from his point of view, the Abbé de Lamennais was right: if you believe in an infallible Church you must bravely destroy the eyes of your intellect and extinguish the light of your soul, and, having voluntarily made yourself blind, let yourself be led by the hand. But, however high a solitary intellect may be placed, it is very quickly reached by the influence of the times in which it lives.
Two or three years ago, an aeronautic friend of mine, Petin, seriously propounded to me viva voce, and to the world through the medium of the daily papers, that he had just solved the great problem of serial navigation. He reasoned thus—
"The earth turns—E pur si muove!—and in the motion of rotation on its own axis, it successively presents every part of its surface, both inhabited and uninhabited. Now, any person, who could raise himself up into the extreme strata of ambient air, and could find a means to keep himself there, would be able to descend in a balloon and alight upon whatever town on the globe he liked; he would only have to wait until that town passed beneath his feet; in that way he could go to the Antipodes in a dozen hours, and without any fatigue whatsoever, since he would not stir from his position, as it would be the earth which would move for him."
This calculation had but one flaw: it was false. The earth, in its vast motion, carries with it every atom of the molecules of its seething atmosphere. It is the same with great spirits which aim at stability; without perceiving that, at the very moment when they think they have cast anchor in the Infinite, they wake up to find they are being carried away in spite of themselves by the irresistible movement of their age. The spirit of Liberalism, with which the atmosphere of the time was charged, carried away the splendid, obstinate and lonely reason of the Abbé de Lamennais. It was about the year 1828. Whilst fighting against the Doctrinaire School, for which he showed a scarcely veiled contempt, M. de Lamennais sought to combine the needs of faith with the necessities of progress; with this end in view he had installed at his château at La Chesnaie a school of young people whom he inculcated with his religious ideas. La Chesnaie was an ancient château of Brittany, shaded by sturdy, centenarian oaks—those natural philosophers, which ponder while their leaves rustle in the breeze on the vicissitudes of man, of which changes they are impassive witnesses. There, this priest, who was already troubled by the new spirit abroad, educated and communed with disciples who held on from far or near to the Church; amongst them were the Abbé Gerbert, Cyprien Robert, now professor of Slavonic literature in the College of France, and a few others. Work—methodical and persevering—was carried on within those old walls, which the sea winds rocked and lashed against. This new academy of Pythagoras studied the science of the century in order to combat it; but, at each fresh ray of light, it recoiled enlightened, and its recoil put weapons to be used against itself into the hands of the enemy. That enemy was Human Thought.