"The sword is drawn between the religious and the political power: if I were not a Frenchman before being a royalist, and a Catholic before a Frenchman, I should find much to rejoice at in this check to the hopes of a certain part of the episcopate who honestly believed in the reign of religious freedom, on the word of the revolutionists. But, good people! if revolution were not despotism, it would not be revolution."
The unity of the church struck him as immeasurably grand. Speaking of the great Spanish convert Donoso-Cortes and his religious works, he says:
"What a marvellous faith it is which makes men situated at such distances of time and place think exactly alike on the most difficult and deepest subjects!"
A most striking passage in his writings is the following opinion on the Reformation:
"Forgive my outspokenness," he writes to his friend M. de Fresne, "if my opinion differs totally from yours. No, the Reformation was not an outburst of holy and generous indignation against abuses and infamies. This indignation possessed all the eminent and virtuous men in the church, but it was not to be found among the reformers. The Reformation, on the contrary, came to legalize corruption and bend the precepts of the Gospel to the exigencies of the flesh. Luther was literally the Mahomet of the West. Both acted through the sword: the one established polygamy, the other divorce, a species of polygamy far more fatal to morals than polygamy proper. If you would know what the Reformation really was, look at its founders and abettors, and see if chastity was dear to them. Henry VIII. married six wives, of whom he divorced two and executed two more; Zwinglius took a wife, Beza took a wife, Calvin took a wife, Luther took a wife, the landgrave of Hesse wished to take a second wife during the lifetime of his first, and Luther authorized him to do so. The caustic Erasmus, whose Catholicism was not very strict, could not help saying that the Reformation was a comedy like many others, where everything ended with marriages. The real reformers of the church, those who reformed her not according to the gospel of passion, but the Gospel of Jesus Christ, were S. Charles Borromeo, S. John of the Cross, S. Teresa, S. Ignatius Loyola, and thousands of holy priests and bishops."
Not to weary the reader by constant comments on the text which reveals this great Christian thinker's mind, we will append the following significant quotations from his letters with as few breaks as possible. They are gathered from a collection extending over a period of more than thirty years:
"The secrets of the church are ruled by a divine order, and to judge of them according to merely human fears or prudence, is to mistake the nature of the church, and to ignore her past. Time takes upon itself the vindication of decisions arrived at by a legitimate authority, even though it be a temporal one; ... truth will come to the surface, and is often manifested by the very men apparently most earnest in combating it.... I believe this work (a religious publication of M. de Broglie) is an event, as much because of the author's character and the principles which his name is understood to represent, as because of the epoch of its publication. This frank confession in the belief of the supernatural in the teeth of the public rationalistic teaching of the day—ever striving to wrap Christ in its own shroud of philosophical verbiage and to bury him in the grave from which he had risen—makes us pray to God and praise him, ... that his kingdom may come.... The struggle nowadays is between God made man, and man making himself God.... I wonder that you take the trouble to break your head thinking about these German dreamers (atheists); for my part, I gave orders long ago to the door-keeper of my brain, if any of these gentleman should ask for me, to say that I was 'not at home.' These old errors served up with the new sauce of a worse darkness than before seem to me very indigestible.
"Genius which devotes itself to evil, far from being a glory, is but a gigantic infamy. Plato is right when he calls it a fatal industry.
"The French Revolution has done in the political world what the Reformation did in the religious world; it has taken from reason her leaning staff, and reason, trying to stand alone, has caused the things we have seen—and so, alas! at this moment, the Revolution cries out for a principle, but is itself the negation of all principle."
In politics, as we have seen, Reboul was a staunch legitimist, but a shrewd observer. He was no dreamer, though his belief in the ancient Bourbons was with him a perfect cultus. He never swerved from the road which he had traced for himself. As a poet, his native city was proud of him, France held out every honor to him, fellow-littérateurs of all shades of opinion welcomed him as a brother, governments flattered him, the people looked up to him. Had he been ambitious, civic and parliamentary honors were ready for him; had he been venal, his career might have been brilliant, lucrative, and idle. In 1844, the mayor of Nîmes, M. Girard, proposed to him a change of occupation, offering him the position of town-librarian, as more suited to his tastes than the trade he followed. He was assured that this appointment would entail no political obligation, that perfect independence of speech and action would be guaranteed to him, but, says M. de Poujoulat: "Reboul, intent above all on the services he could render the cause among his own surroundings, and solicitous of hedging in the dignity of his life with the most spotless integrity, refused the mayor's offer. He did not even seek to make a merit of his refusal; his friends knew nothing of it; M. de Fresne alone was in the secret, and it was not divulged till years after." The Cross of the Legion of Honor was twice offered him: once by the government of Louis Philippe, through the agency of the minister M. de Salvandy, who was fond of seeking out honest and independent talent, but the loyal poet answered briefly: "He who alone has the right to decorate me is not in France"; and again by the empire, when it was urged that the decoration was a homage such as might have been respectfully offered in les Arènes (the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes). Reboul proudly yet playfully replied that "he had not yet quite reached the state of a monument," and feeling plenty of vitality left in him, did not need the red ribbon. He explains to his friend M. de Fresne that he asked the God of S. Louis to enlighten his perplexities, to lift his soul above all small vanities, to deliver him from political rancor, if he harbored any, and to guide him to a decision which would leave him at peace with himself. "I have not the presumption," he adds, "to think that I received an inspiration from above, but I believe in the efficacy of prayer. I know not if I was heard, but at any rate I did my best."