No outward circumstances accounted for this sudden pause. It was an internal need to which he responded by such a simple and actual withdrawal from life as seems unprovided for, even in the conceptions of Protestant piety. The spirit of Lacordaire, says one of his closest companions, his maternal friend, Madam Swetchine, required only the power of “subduing and containing itself in obscurity,” to become sublime; a great and general necessity of all others the least easily attainable. To accomplish such a victory over ourselves, we, in our heretical pride of reason and self-command, have no external aids. What we can do towards this greatest of conquests we must do under the cover of ordinary circumstances and labour, and few and happy are the men who do not find this perennial conflict recur in their disengaged moments all through their lives. But the Catholic Church has ordained a system of helps and stimulants in the great work of ruling their own spirit, which is harder to most men than taking cities. When the young Father Lacordaire felt the reins gliding out of his hands, in whatever way that occurred—for we have no information on the subject—the expedient of flight suggested itself to him, as it would have been very unlikely to do to an Englishman in similar circumstances. The Catholic priest thought it no shame to acknowledge to himself that his spirit stood in need of discipline. All the saints and holy men of his Church had at some period of their lives fled from the attractions of the world, and used sharp methods of subduing the flesh, which they did not hesitate to acknowledge was too strong for them. Lacordaire, too, withdrew to get the mastery of his own spirit. This was his object in going to Rome. He was in the height of manhood, thirty-four years old—the very noon of life. He was no superstitious or visionary priest, but a man already versed in the ways of the world, who had acquitted himself with intuitive good sense in more than one difficult crisis. He had passed through scepticism, through criticism, to that dutiful and steadfast faith which knew both how to reason and how to obey. He was not disappointed or unfortunate, but, on the contrary, glowing with success and triumph of the kind most gratifying to such a man. He was not even of an archæological type of mind, nor romantically prejudiced in favour of the antique institutions of Christendom; he was a liberal, a man of his day, an educated modern mind—able, surely, if ever priest or Catholic was, to form his opinion freely. He had arrested himself by his own will in a career abundantly flattering to all his tastes and vanities, and now stood thoughtful in the mid-current of his life to determine how he should best perfect and utilise that existence still in its highest force and power. Wandering about Rome, among its monuments and relics, praying to God, as he himself says, in its basilicas, he pondered this great question. Nowhere could have been found a fitter scene.