Side by side with these violent and insulting invectives leveled at the government of France, the Avenir placed a declaration of respect and submission to the chief of the Church of Rome: "We profess," it said, "the most complete obedience to the authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. We will not have other faith than his faith, other doctrine than his doctrine. All that he approves we approve, all that he condemns we condemn, and without the shadow of a reservation; we, each of us, submit to the judgment of the Holy See all our past, all our future writings, of what nature soever they may be." Here, at least, the revolutionary spirit seemed absent, or, at all events, was in a hurry to disavow itself.

I am persuaded that, in holding this language, the Abbé de la Mennais was sincere. When an exclusive idea or passion sways a man's mind, nothing is more unknown to him than his own future conduct; he knows even less what he will do than what he is doing. The Abbé de la Mennais no more suspected in 1831 what he would say and what he would do a few years later, than the most violent leaders of the French Revolution suspected in 1789 what they would be and what they would do in 1793. The court at Rome was clearer-sighted than its fanatical champion; it had been under the influence of the charm of the first works and of the first successes of the Abbé de la Mennais. It had not, however, failed to perceive what pernicious and dangerous seed might thence germinate. The Avenir occasioned it profound disquietude; the principles and the yearnings of modern society found therein a too ready acceptance; the régime which had governed France since 1830 was too much the object of its attacks; it demanded too much liberty, and made too much noise in doing so; for beneath that noise, and in the shadow of that liberty, fermented the anarchical doctrines and tendencies which in all cases and places it is the aim and the policy of the court of Rome to contest. Thus the Avenir and its writers placed her in a position full of embarrassment; Rome was anxious neither in any way to ignore the services that they had rendered and that they might continue to render her, nor to lose sight of the perils that they made her incur; Rome desired to preserve silence respecting these writers—neither to avow nor disavow them—and to leave it to time to terminate their transport and their errors. The Abbé de la Mennais did not, however, permit this expectant policy; he insisted absolutely that the papacy, by pronouncing upon his doctrines and upon his attitude, should publicly either give him her support or withdraw it from him. All the world knows of the journey which he undertook in 1831 to Rome to obtain this result, and of his stay there in company with the Abbé Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert, "three obscure Christians"—to use the words of the Abbé de la Mennais—men who thought themselves called, according to the expression of the Abbé Lacordaire before the Cour d'Assises at Paris, "to reconcile Catholicism with the world." The Pope (Gregory XVI.) judged otherwise, and by his encyclical of the 15th August, 1832, with regret, but at the same time with as much decision as to the substantial matters before him as tenderness to the three pilgrims personally, condemned the Avenir, its doctrines, and its tendencies. On the instant, with the concurrence of their friends, they declared, all three, (10th September, 1832,) that, respectfully submitting themselves to the authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, they abandoned the lists in which they had faithfully combated during the past two years; that, in consequence, the Avenir, which had been provisionally suspended ever since the 15th November previously, would no longer appear, and that the General Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty was dissolved.

As the first declaration of the writers of the Avenir, after their acquittal by the Cour d'Assises at Paris, had been sincere, so was also the declaration sincere which was published by them immediately after their condemnation by the papacy; but they promised more than they could perform. When a deep social wound has been laid bare, and measures on a large scale have been adopted to cure it, it is no longer in the power of any individual to keep that wound secret, or to stifle the hope of a remedy. How many times in the course of this century has not the papacy, and have not the ardent champions of liberty, condemned and combated the efforts made to reconcile Catholicism with modern civilization, and to cause the Church to accept the liberties of civil society, and the State to recognize the rights of the Church? How often has the Church by its censures signalized such efforts as impious and suicidal? What wit, what eloquence, have not been displayed by the Liberals to declare their vanity, their worthlessness? To what reproaches, invectives, and sarcasms have not their advocates had to submit? But no ecclesiastical censure, no wrath of religion, no mockery of liberalism has arrested the march of this great idea. It has made, and it continues every day to force, its way in spite of condemnations, attacks, and obstacles of every description. Why? For paramount reasons, impossible to be lost sight of. For Christianity and modern civilization confront each other; there exists in the public a profound and irrepressible feeling of their reciprocal right and strength—a profound and irrepressible feeling that their disagreement is an immense evil for society and for men's souls; that neither the new civil liberties nor the ancient forms of belief and influences of Christianity can ever perish; that, necessary, both of them, to nations and to individuals, they are both of them destined to live, and consequently to live together. When and in what manner will this feeling realize its object, and when will the ancient Church and modern civilization have solved the problem of their mutual pacification? No one can at this moment pronounce; but in all certitude, the problem will not for that cease to weigh upon the world, or the world to strive at its solution. Even the men who, in a spirit of pious submission or in a paroxysm of sadness and discouragement might wish, after having attempted it, to renounce the work, could never remain inactive before a necessity becoming more and more urgent; they doubtless would not be long before they returned to the lists from which they might have consented to withdraw.

And this is what happened to the three eminent men who had made so precipitate a journey to Rome, and had importuned her at an inconvenient moment, summoning her at once to solve the momentous questions they had raised. They returned from Rome with the intention of submitting to the decision of the Pope; but slumber to such souls was impossible, and it was not long before men saw them, the three, resuming, although by the most contrary paths, all the activity of their minds and of their lives. The Abbé de la Mennais threw himself with impetuosity into the revolt—a revolt radical against the Church and against the State; furiously demanding from the populace and from revolutions the success which he could not obtain in the bosom of order, and in concert with the authority previously so ardently defended by him. Far from following in his new and violent course, the Abbé Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert separated from him, and returned each to his natural and tranquil position; the one to that of a simple priest, almoner of the convent of the Visitation, and preacher in the chapel of the College Stanislas; the other to that of a young and brilliant political orator, already a favorite in the chamber of Peers, although its members did not always think or vote with him. Both remained Romanists at heart; they zealously shared in the great movement of Christianity, now roused from her slumber, but without ceasing to be Liberals in their Catholicism, or without arresting their efforts to reconcile the Church with the régime of liberty.

The position of each, and the genius of each, determined the share that he took in the duties, and the place that he selected for the field of his action. The Abbé Lacordaire, from the pulpit of Notre Dame, developed, or rather let me say, painted, in all their splendor, the truths, the beauties, the moral and social excellences of the Christian Faith and of the Catholic Church. M. de Montalembert, in the house of Peers and in literature, was the ardent and indefatigable champion of the Church, of its maxims, and of its rights. To neither was there any lack of success any more than any lack of talent and of zeal. A numerous auditory, young and old, from the salons and from the schools, believers and freethinkers, flocked round the Abbé Lacordaire, all feeling the attraction, and almost all the charm; many among them yielding to the persuasion of that eloquence so fresh and vivid, and abundant, and unlooked for—impetuous without rudeness, hardy yet graceful, natural even where there was temerity of thought or of expression, and repairing or vailing these faults by the enchantment of candor and of originality. Different, but not inferior, were the merits and the successes of M. de Montalembert. He was a combatant young too, a fearless Christian, both in the political arena and in society; and he carried with him in his polemics to the service of the State a sincerity of passion, a rich and mobile eloquence, piquant strokes of wit, an outpouring of indignant conviction, all of which deeply stirred the emotions of his auditors, whether friends or adversaries, and left in the mind of calm spectators an impression of approving satisfaction, however frequently a shock might be given to their feelings of moderation and of fairness. In the "Conferences" of the Abbé Lacordaire it cannot be denied that many failings and many omissions are observable; although expressed clearly and with vivacity, his thought was often superficial; there was in turn a singular mixture of precipitate enthusiasm and of discretion, the former displaying itself in his exordiums, the latter at the close of his discourses. He announced courageously his opinions, but accompanied them by more reservations than are usually expected from one of his Church and party: thus at the same time, that throughout all his discourses, and in their general character, he showed himself the friend of religious liberty, he hesitated sometimes even when the occasion required him to proclaim its fundamental principle and to rebuke its violations. On his side, M. de Montalembert gave himself up entirely to the impression and the combat of the moment; in his legitimate ardor for free instruction, the then chosen object of his public life, he held obstacles, however real, of no account; he ignored the time necessary for its final triumph, as well as the real progress, although partial, which it had obtained, from the co-operation or the sufferance of the government of 1830; and in his uncompromising defense of the Church, he was more violent against the members of the executive government than his own sentiments and his real political views would, in moments of cool reflection, have permitted him to be. The Abbé Lacordaire did not sound sufficiently the sources of his opinions; M. de Montalembert did not properly measure his attacks. But in spite of their shortcomings and of our own, of their faults and of our own, in all the struggles that grew out of religious questions between us, they rendered constantly faithful and powerful services to their cause, which, notwithstanding our dissentiments on other points, was really the cause of Christ's Faith awaking to new birth and life on the bosom of Liberty.

It is not without well reflecting that I term that our cause. When religious liberty reigns in a State, it is a great and a too common error to believe that the statesmen charged with its government have no religious belief whatever; that they are careless in matters of faith because they embrace and advocate the cause of liberty of conscience. The soul does not abdicate the right to its proper and intimate life, because it respects in other souls the rights of that same life; and nothing is more logical or more legitimate than to sustain with fervor the principle of freedom of conscience, and yet to be at the same time a true and an earnest Christian.