Amidst these theatrical diversions the chronicler alludes to the fashionable preaching which occupied the gay world at hours when playhouses and drawing-rooms were not open. There was a religious revival going on in Paris almost equal to that which Moody and Sankey have produced here. "During Passion Week" (1843) "the crowd in all the churches, but at Notre Dame particularly, was prodigious. M. de Ravignan preached three times a day--at one o'clock for the women of the gay world, in the evening for the men, at other hours for the workingmen. He adapted his sermons to the different classes: to the women of the world he spoke as a man who knows the world and has belonged to it. They rushed, they crowded, they wept. I do not know how many communicants there were at Easter, but I believe the figure has not been so high for fifty years." At Advent of the same year the same scenes were repeated, with the Abbe Lacordaire in the pulpit. This excitement, and the debates in the Chamber on the subject of the theological lectures at the Sorbonne and College of France, call forth some excellent pages regarding the condition of Catholicism in France and the Gallican Church, and a brief, rapid review of the causes of the decline of the latter, which Sainte-Beuve asserts (more than thirty years ago) to be defunct. "Gallicanism, the noblest child of Catholicism, is dead before his father, _who in his dotage remains obstinately faithful to his principles_.... Gallicanism in its dissolution left a vast patrimony: the Jesuits may grab a huge bit of it, but the bulk will be diminished and disseminated.... At the rate things are going, Catholicism is tending to become _a sect_." The insight of this is as remarkable as the expression. Some years afterward, marking the progress of liberal ideas in religion, he says: "Men's conceptions of God are constantly changing. What was the atheism of yesterday will be the deism of to-morrow."