In view of all this endeavour to dissolve society, Bonald makes his attempt to save it. It is a special institution which he aims at rescuing. Society is founded upon marriage, stands or falls with that. The Revolution has made divorce lawful. But where divorce is possible, marriage no longer exists. Therefore every possible effort must be made to procure the repeal of the law of divorce. The effort was made, and was only too successful. Let us hear what Bonald's theory is. He maintains (as usual) that a properly developed reasoning faculty reduces all relations to the triad of ideas--cause, means, and effect--the most universally applicable which reason can evolve. These ideas lie at the foundation of every judgment, and form the basis of all social order. Every society consists of three distinct personages, who may be termed the social personages. Reason perceives in God, who wills, the first _cause_; in the man who executes God's will, the _means_, or minister, or mediator; and in the order of things which goes by the name of society, the _effect_ which is produced by the will of God and the action of man. But the reason which argues thus exists, in Bonald's opinion, only in conjunction with the Catholic religion. He says: "Religion, which places God at the head of society, gives man an exalted idea of his own dignity and a strong feeling of independence, whilst philosophy, which assigns the highest place to man himself, is always grovelling at the feet of some idol or other--in Asia at Mahomet's, in Europe at Luther's, Rousseau's, or Voltaire's." (_Du Divorce_, 42.)