Even the age of enlightenment did not deal so-called revealed religion a severer blow than did this emotionalism. Schleiermacher, as we see, resolves religion into feeling, and in so doing destroys its authority by making over this authority to the human soul in all its endless variability. All rules, ordinances, dogmas, and principles disappear; each individual is, by a special process, to make everything his own. For Schleiermacher maintains that "however perfectly a man may understand such principles, however firmly he may be convinced that he possesses them, if he does not know and cannot prove that they have arisen in himself as expressions of his own spiritual life and are consequently originally his own, we must not let ourselves be persuaded to believe that such a man is a religious man. He is not; his soul has never conceived; his religious ideas are only supposititious children, the offspring of other souls, whom he, in the secret feeling of his own impotence, has adopted." Thus essentially Protestant in the good (hence not the sectarian) sense of the word is the religious revival in Germany in its beginnings. It asserts _personal_ originality to be the one essential factor in religion, and defines as the province of religion the whole widespread realm of our warm, true feelings. Natural, healthy feeling is always holy, at no time peculiarly holy. A marked and significant contrast to all this is provided by the principles set forth in Lamennais' great work, which forms the Latin and Catholic counterpart to Schleiermacher's Lectures. These principles, the programme of pure externality, are as follows: 1. That _feeling_ or indirect revelation is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion. 2. That _scientific research_ or _reasoning_ is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion. 3. That _authority_ is the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion; and that consequently the true religion is unquestionably the religion which rests upon the strongest possible visible (!) authority. It is to prove these three remarkable and droll assertions that Lamennais has written his four thick volumes. Let us make ourselves acquainted with their very imperfect chain of reasoning. It is of paramount importance to us human beings to discover an infallible criterion of what is true and what is false. What we seek is _certainty_. But where are we to find it?