"dull care." The young folk, in many places, receive their first and last communion at twelve or fourteen, and that is the end of their conformity. A worse feature yet in the domestic manners, resulting from this state of religion, is the fact that girls and boys are brought up very much in the same way, and are thrown promiscuously together, spending their evenings where they choose. Parents have ceased to ask their children--_Why were you not at church? Were you at vespers? Were you at mass?_ and in fact are the first to corrupt their offspring, by their brutal irreligion, and coarse language, and shameless behaviour.[8] Such is the moral picture of France. The Abbé has brightened his mass of shadow with here and there a reflection of light, but there is no mistaking his work for a Claude Lorraine. France is in a moral eclipse, and her portrait presents, of necessity, the _chiaro 'scuro_ of a Rembrandt. One needs no more than these confessions of a French ecclesiastic to account for her false and fickle notions of liberty, and for her interminable _émeutes_ and revolutions. Yet if Quinet has not wholly invented his assertions, the Conservatism of France is pledged to prescribe as remedies the same old poison from which the disease results. It would take the Christianity of the nation, at its last gasp, and dose it anew with Ultramontanism. They have adopted the sound principle, that Christianity moulds a people to enlightened notions of liberty, but they seem not to know that it does this by acting directly upon the conscience; and hence their political system is spoiled by their fatal substitution, for pure Christianity, of that spurious religion whose great defect is precisely this, that it does not undertake to cleanse and cure the conscience, but only to subject it, mechanically, to irrational authority. Montesquieu, in asserting the importance of Christianity, without question failed to detect this essential defect in Popery, but he instinctively taught his countrymen, by memorable example, to eschew Ultramontanism. In the closing scene of a life which, with all its blemishes, was a great life, and, in comparison with his times, a good one, he accepted with reverence the ministrations of his parish priest, but repulsed from his deathbed, with aversion and disgust, the officious and intrusive Jesuits.[9] De Maistre is more devout than Montesquieu, but he is less jealous of liberty, and his ideas of "what a people ought to will" are limited, if not illiberal. His more moderate ally, Ballanche, has not unjustly characterised him as "not, like Providence, merciful, but, like destiny, inexorable." It is impossible that a Conservatism, of which such is the sovereign genius, should achieve anything for the restoration of such a country as France. I have, indeed, predicted the restoration of the Bourbons, according to de Maistre's principles, by the sheer tenacity of life which belongs to a hereditary claim, and by