Salvation and Desertion._--One of the most vivid, and at the same time most tragic, narratives of the life of the French Revolution, is that written by the young and spirited son of a prelate--the Abbe de Lamennais. The father was a Roman Catholic prelate, and from his family the author inherited his religious faith. Lamennais became deeply impressed with the ideas of the Reformation, and, entering on the career of a theologian, he preached a kind of free-thought. After a time he broke with the Roman Church, and declared himself a Protestant. This change of creed was naturally followed by a complete change of conduct. The Abbe became devoted to the cause of freedom, and threw himself into the midst of every revolutionary movement. But during the revolution of 1830 he was cruelly maltreated by the authorities, and he suffered so much that his health was greatly impaired, so that when the revolution came to an end he was still more embittered against the Catholic Church, and more and more deeply plunged into revolutionary ideas. His mind became overwhelmed with new convictions. His religious faith was lost, his political faith was shaken, and a great sense of social despair settled on his soul, through the ruin of his hopes of earthly progress and happiness. "I am convinced," he says, "that the faith of Christ is not the universal remedy for all evil; that our age is not one in which the power of miracles can revive in human hearts; that there is a God for me, just as there is for everyone else; that there is a divine providence alike over all; but that man has broken with this providence, and I am conscious of being abandoned by it." He goes on to say, "If I believed in a supernatural mission for the clergy I should still be a Christian; I would then call upon God to save this country, for the misfortunes of religion would be but the instrument of the progress of good." It was his deep faith in the supernatural mission of Christianity, which was lost through the change in his ideas, that gave such a fervor and energy to his utterances in condemnation of Christianity. In those days he was a man of powerful and even brilliant eloquence, and no small part of his fame was due to the eloquence of his sermons. "I have often," he says, "heard at the opera fine and pathetic scenes from Shakespeare's plays, but never did I hear such fine scenes as those I heard that year, in the midst of the most horrible catastrophes. The most tragic day in my life is that day on which I quitted a society that had become impossible for me to bear any longer. I am sure I have never, not even in my worst moments, sinned against men. Every crime I have ever committed has been against mankind--against those who claimed to speak for it, and in the name of it. In this sense, I am and have been the enemy of mankind." In one of his last works he gave vent to his profound horror of the moral ruin that came over him through his revolutionary hatred of the Church. In a work entitled _Essai sur la Liberté de Penser_, in which he tried to define his intellectual and social convictions, he wrote, "There is no longer any truth; there are no longer any principles but the principles of liberty and equality. In Europe, there are neither great men nor great cities nor great events; only a great political revolution has been made from end to end, and there has been accomplished the greatest confusion of things that could be found among mankind. In one part of Europe, the taste for the beautiful has abandoned painting and sculpture; in another, it has abandoned poetry; in another, it has abandoned music. In one country it has abandoned the love of children, in another it has abandoned the love of truth. The world is broken into atoms, life is dead, art is dead, truth is dead. Those who made this revolution have made a revolution in the nature of humanity, a revolution as complete as the one which is imprinted in our eyes by the lightning which blinds us. Every morning the whole human race rises and begins a new life. But the human race that arose this morning has nothing in common with the human race that arose yesterday. . . . Where is the truth that remains among us? Among those who had least faith in the old doctrine, there is no longer any such doctrine. It has been condemned by the people of this country in a great political assembly which may be the more correctly called a revolution. I was there to give my vote, and the majority was against it. The great revolution that has overthrown the ancient order of things has also overthrown all those things that made Christianity possible; the great revolution has destroyed the very idea of God." This may seem an immoderate statement. But it is to be remembered that Lamennais at this time was a mere boy of twenty-two, and very immature in thought and feeling. It must also be borne in mind that the violence and intensity with which the revolution went on, and the fury of the contest against Christianity which the revolutionists in France carried on for a long period, made it well nigh impossible to think of religion except as a pretext and a form of hypocrisy. It was when a reaction against this contest had set in that Lamennais first came forward as an apostle of religion. And no one can feel any doubt that if the revolutionary movement had been allowed to continue for any length of time, it would have destroyed Christianity. It is to the infinite credit of the civilization of France that, after the terrible shock and the furious and unprincipled anarchy of the time, there should have come a reaction which placed men in such deep distress that the religious element had to come to the help of the moral and social life of the nation, and to supply a solid foundation for the work of social reconstruction. There is no doubt that this was an extraordinary movement of the social elements in France to which nothing like it had ever occurred before. The movement has been often described. It seemed as if nothing could be left for a man to trust to but religion. Not only was there no truth left for us, but there was no right in things, nothing worthy of respect and conformity. One by one, almost, the old foundations of social morality and social law crumbled to nothingness, until the very foundations of morality seemed to be undermined. This was only a symbol of the moral ruin of men's minds, a symbol of the moral destitution that had come over the people. Such a condition of things made men eager to seek for a basis of all things in religion, and it was through the restoration of Christianity to the French nation that a great moral movement was carried out. On the one hand, there is every reason to believe that if this tremendous social revolution had been continued longer, or if other revolutionary tendencies had prevailed, Christianity would have been swept away, and with it morality, and all hope of regeneration. But as a matter of fact, the tendency was checked by the very intensity and moral ferocity of the revolution itself, and out of the reaction that followed, the revival of religion took place. The _Réforme_, by which many moderate Catholics turned to the Church, served to revive the idea of the supernatural, and to supply a basis for a new and more religious and moral conception of the relation of God to man. If this was the result of the reaction from the social excesses of the Revolution, it was all the more remarkable because the revolution itself and the reaction did not originate in the Church. It was an old and very respectable Church which came forward to save France, and for the most part it was conservative and not revolutionary in its tendencies. It was not the work of the upper classes, who had often been hostile to religion, and it was not the work of the middle or lower classes who had had little or no experience of religion. It was the work of a class just rising into importance--the middle classes--the people with whom the Church was most in sympathy, and among whom the religious sentiment was strongest. The events of the Revolution had taught the people that there was truth in religion, and this truth had been put to a severe test. They had found that there were certain truths essential to their moral and social life. When religion was assailed, it taught them that there were other truths than those of secular morality and secular government which were essential to the happiness and welfare of man. What seemed to them to be the real truth was not fighting the truth of religion; it was fighting those elements which had seemed to them to have made it impossible for religion to do its work. When this class came forward to help religion, the time for resistance was past. Christianity had triumphed not only in the hearts of those who had fought for it, but in the minds and hearts of the world at large.