There is nothing to be added to this logic.
The Abbé de Lamennais.
I do not go to see prisoners, like Tartuffe, to distribute alms to them, but to enrich my intelligence by contact with men who are worth more than I. If their opinions differ from mine, I am not afraid: stubborn Christian that I am, all the fine geniuses in the world would not shake my faith; I am sorry for them, and my charity protects me against seduction. If I sin through excess, they sin through deficiency; I understand what they understand, they do not understand what I understand. In the same prison where I used to visit the noble and unfortunate Carrel, I now visit the Abbé de Lamennais[437]. The Revolution of July has relegated to the darkness of a gaol the remnant of the superior men of whom it can neither appraise the merit nor endure the effulgency. In the last room as one goes up, under a slooping roof which we can touch with our heads[438], we silly believers in liberty, François[439] de Lamennais and François de Chateaubriand, talk of serious things. Struggle as he please, his ideas have remained in the religious mould; their form has remained Christian, even when their substance is furthest removed from dogma: his speech has retained the sound of Heaven.
A true believer professing heresy, the author of the Essai sur l'indifférence[440] talks my language with ideas that are not my ideas. If, after having embraced the popular evangelical teaching, he had remained attached to the priesthood, he would have preserved the authority which variations have destroyed. The parish priests, the new members of the clergy (and the most distinguished among those ecclesiastics) were going towards him; the bishops would have found themselves involved in his cause if he had clung to the Gallican liberties, while continuing to venerate the successor of St. Peter and defending unity.
In France, the youth of the country would have gathered round the missionary, in whom it found the ideas which it loves and the progress to which it aspires; in Europe, the attentive dissenters would have raised no obstacle; great Catholic nations, the Poles, the Irish, the Spaniards, would have blessed the preacher who had risen up. Rome herself would have ended by seeing that the new evangelist was causing the dominion of the Church to take new birth and supplying the oppressed Pontiff with the means of resisting the influence of the absolute kings. What power of life! Intellect, religion, liberty represented in a priest!
God did not wish it: the light suddenly failed him who was the light; the guide, stealing away, left his flock in darkness. But my fellow-countryman, though his public career has been interrupted, will always have his private superiority left and his pre-eminence in natural gifts. In the order of time, he ought to survive me; I summon him to my death-bed to agitate our great conquests at those gates through which there is no returning. I should like to see his genius shed upon me the absolution which once his hand had the right to call down upon my head. We were lulled at our birth by the same waves[441]; may my ardent faith and my sincere admiration be permitted to hope that I shall meet my reconciled friend once more on the same shore of eternal things[442].
On the upshot, my investigations lead me to conclude that the old society is giving way beneath itself, that it is impossible for whosoever is not a Christian to understand the future society pursuing its career and satisfying at one time either the purely republican or the moderate monarchical idea. In any hypothesis, you can derive the improvements which you desire only from the Gospel.
At the bottom of the actual sectarians, what we find is always the plagiarism, the parody of the Gospel, always the apostolic principle: that principle has entered into us so deeply that we use it as though it belongs to us; we presume it to be natural, even though it be not so to us; it has come to us from our old faith, to take the latter two or three steps in the ascending line above us. Many a man of independent mind occupied with the perfecting of his fellows would never have thought of it if the right of the peoples had not been laid down by the Son of Man. Every act of philanthropy in which we indulge, every system of which we dream in the interests of humanity, is but the Christian idea turned over, changed in name and too often disfigured: it is always the Word made Flesh[443]!
The Christian idea.