Amid the ruins of many a grand ambition, over the traces engraven in the earth by many a haughty and undisciplined spirit, the thoughtful priest wandered, meditating the highest uses of his own life. His thoughts came to a conclusion which, to our eyes, seems the most inconceivable and astonishing ever made by man. He decided upon becoming a monk. Aware by many a mortifying experience that the very name of priest was still suspected and disliked in his own country, where all his power and influence lay, this man, so sensible, so moderate, so dutiful, whose genius had not made him eccentric, and whose sympathies were all with his own age, decided that the best thing he could do for France and the glory of God was to clothe his own vigorous life and personality in the obsolete dress of the cloister. It was not the cloistered indolence of an Italian convent to which he looked forward. In the strength of his life and genius he felt no need of that repose, which would but have chafed him. Eager for work, conscious of his own powers, devoted to his own country, and seeking to qualify himself for renewed and advancing labour, this was the decision to which Lacordaire came; a decision altogether inexplicable and amazing, which we are unable to account for at this distance, much less to explain. Nor was this resolution adopted by any capricious impulse, or in any flash of imaginative ardour. It was a conclusion obtained not without pain and resistance of the flesh. “I persuaded myself then,” he explains, in one of his latest productions, quoted by M. de Montalembert, “while wandering about Rome, and praying God in its basilicas, that the greatest service which could be rendered to Christendom in the times in which we live, was to do something for the restoration of the religious orders. But this persuasion, though it was for me the very light of the Gospel, left me undecided and trembling, when I came to consider how unfit I was for such a great work. My faith, thank God, was profound. I loved Jesus Christ and His Church above everything created. I had loved glory before I loved God, but nothing else. Besides, in descending into myself, I found nothing there which seemed to me to answer to the idea of a founder or even restorer of an order. When I contemplated these Colossi of Christian strength and piety my soul fell under me, like a horseman under his horse—I was struck to the ground discouraged and wounded. The mere idea of sacrificing my liberty to a rule and to superiors overwhelmed me. The son of an age which scarcely knew how to obey, independence had been my couch and my guide. How could I transform myself suddenly into a docile heart, and henceforward trust only in submission for the light of my conduct?” The question was hard to answer. Of all men the young editor of ‘L’Avenir’ might have seemed the least likely to attain such a height of virtue; but from this difficulty he escapes, after much further self-argument,