“Nothing could be more simple or ordinary than the life of this young priest. Those who seek romances or stormy passages in the lives of historical personages, or at least in their youth, must find them elsewhere. No adventure, no stroke of fate or of passion, troubled the course of his early years. The son of a village doctor, educated by a pious mother, he had, like almost all the young men of the time, lost his faith at college, and did not regain it either in the school of law or at the bar, where he ranked for two years among the advocates. In appearance nothing distinguished him from his contemporaries. He was a Deist, like all the youth of the time; he was, above all, liberal, like all France, but without excess. He shared the convictions and the generous delusions which we all breathed in the air which had been purified by the downfall of imperial despotism, but he desired only a liberty strong and legitimate; and without having yet been enlightened by the lights of faith, he already foresaw the supreme danger of modern society, for at twenty he wrote ‘Impiety leads to depravity,’ ‘Corrupt morals produce corrupt laws,’ and ‘Licence carries the nations on to slavery.’ He himself remained always virtuous and regular in his morals, without any other passion than for glory. Even before he became a Christian he respected himself.” Life, however, soon quickened into warmer bloom, in the heart of this virtuous young heathen. Providence had other occupation for him than the practice of the French bar, and the excitement of those politics which present such a fantastic succession of revolution and stagnation, violence and apathy. He woke up out of his classic convictions into Christian life, and with characteristic promptitude, as soon as he believed, devoted himself to the service of religion. “Neither man nor book was the instrument of his conversion,” says his biographer. “A sudden and secret touch of grace opened his eyes to the nothingness of irreligion. In one day he became a Christian, and the next, being a Christian, determined to become a priest.” This prompt and clear spirit, swiftly logical, unimpassioned, and master of itself, pervaded his entire life. It was not argument or exhortation that convinced him. He perceived in his rapid young soul—aware as he was of forces in himself which must have work to occupy them, and of unspeakable want in the world around him—“the nothingness of irreligion”—a notable and significant discovery. That elegant, classic, unproductive blank of Pagan virtue—could anything ever come of it, even in its highest development? Swiftly the alternative presented itself to the young Frenchman. Out of this “nothingness” he did not come by halves. From the first freedom of his young manhood and accomplished education, he went back again steadily to the rules and studies of a new training. After three years at the seminary of St Sulpice he became a priest, at a time