It was particularly on the occasion of those sudden fits of passion to which the human conscience does not always attach due weight, that Delsarte laid great stress upon supernatural intervention.
Oh! what would he have done without that powerful aid, with his lively sensibilities--with his too loving heart?
I have no opinion to offer in regard to the shield which efficacious grace and the palladium of the faith may form for dangerous tendencies; for Catholics, that is a matter for the casuist or the confessor to decide; but, as far as Delsarte is concerned, had he beaten down Satan in a way to rouse the jealousy of St. Michael, had he made the heathen Socrates give precedence to him in patience, wisdom and firmness, I should regard that victory as the triumph of the sacred principles of the eternal morality, of that which sums up, in a single group, all the supreme precepts of all religions and all philosophies, rather than as a result of external practices.
It is by placing myself at this culminating point, that I have succeeded in explaining to my own satisfaction the true stimulus of the artist-thinker, in spite of all appearances and all contradictions; and everything leads me to believe that the elevation of his mind and the inspiration of the art which he taught and practiced, would have sufficed, in equal proportion with his faith, "to deliver him from evil."
How could a man glide into the lower walks of life, whose mission it was to set forth the types of moral beauty by opposing them, to use his phrase, "to the hideousnesses of vice?"
Now, talent and faith meet face to face. We are to consider to what extent the one was dependent upon the other; and whether, in reality, the artist whom so many voices proclaimed "incomparable" owed his vast superiority to acts of religious devotion, to his adhesion to the dogmas of the church.
It is not arbitrarily that a transcendent intellect pointed out a difference between religion and religions: every mind devoted to philosophy must needs reach this distinction.
I shall keep strictly within the limits of that which concerns art, in a question so vast and of such great importance.
Religion is that need which all generations of men have felt for establishing a relationship between man and the supreme power or powers whence man supposes he proceeded. To some it is an outburst of gratitude and homage; to others, an instinct of terror which makes them fall prostrate before an unknown being upon whom they feel themselves dependent, although they cannot know him, still less define him.
Religions are all which men have established in answer to those aspirations of the conscience, to satisfy that intuition which forces itself upon our mind so long as sophistry has not warped it. It follows from this, that religions vary, are changed, and may be falsified until the primitive meaning is lost. But whatever may be the faith and the rites of religions--whether fanaticism disfigure them or fetichism make a caricature of them, whether politicians use them as an ally, or the traces of the apostolate fade beneath the materialism of speculation,--there will always remain at the bottom, religion: that is, the thought which keeps such or such a society alive for a variable time, and which, in periods of transition, seeks refuge in human consciences awaiting a fresh social upward flight.