_Adolphe_, the chief work of this man's youth, deserves some study. In it we find the following utterance: "What surprises me is, not that humanity should feel the need of a religion, but that it should in any age fancy itself strong enough, and sufficiently secure from disaster, to venture to reject anyone religion. It seems to me as if in its weakness it should rather be prone to invoke the aid of them all. Is there, in the dense darkness which surrounds us, any ray of light that we can afford to reject? Does there float on the whirling torrent which carries us along with it any branch to which we dare refuse to cling?" We feel that the author is more certain of the existence of the whirling torrent than of the branch. His manner of recommending religion reveals his own lack of it, and a profound depth of melancholy. The explanation is simple. There was a reaction against Voltaire in the air at that time, a reaction practically inaugurated by Rousseau--the rebound of repressed, unconsulted, ignored feeling. A half-unconscious effort was going on in men's minds to restore the balance between the demands and the possibilities of the human soul which had been disturbed during the autocratic reign of critical intellect; and this half-conscious tendency was plainly perceptible even in men whose natures were really akin to Voltaire's, and who, had they been born thirty years earlier, would have been his eager sympathisers and fellow-workers. Voltaire had not only criticised, he had been forced by the evils of the times and by his unruly wit into an attitude of aggression. With all available weapons, even poisoned ones, he had attacked those purely external, palpable forms of authority, which in his time stood in the way of honourable human conditions, nay, made them impossible. Now all these powers had fallen, and the times once more craved authority. There are inner, spiritual authorities. The Right, the Good, the True are such. But the enthusiastic attempts to introduce and establish a free form of government which should realise these ideals without the invocation of any authority unexplainable by reason, had resulted in the savage excesses of lawlessness. What wonder, then, that not only many ordinary individuals began to grope after planks from the wreck of the once powerful political and religious systems, but that also a majority of the most highly gifted came forward as the champions of some authority, either temporal or spiritual, which they supported for the sake of the principle, but with no real belief or confidence in it.