We have already seen that his doctrine led to the sacrificing of secular to ecclesiastical infallibility in cases of collision between them. But this was in reality equivalent to acknowledging that the heretical, free-thinking school was right in repudiating the quality of inviolability and irreversibility which the royalist writers ascribed to the monarchy by the grace of God. It moreover made the temporal power dependent on the spiritual, namely, on the Pope. All the bishops of France responded with a manifesto in which they declared the secular to be independent of the Papal power. Lamennais, the champion of _authority_, now stood in the most strained relations with both the ecclesiastical and the temporal authorities. His democratic period does not lie within the scope of the present work. We shall only note the germs of the later development which exist in his original theory of authority. This new theory of authority is fascinatingly unlike the good old hard and fast doctrine propounded by Bonald and De Maistre immediately after the Revolution. The reaction is now much more an affair of reason, consequently much less an affair of immovable principles. Every serious attempt to show the grounds upon which the principle of authority rests must inevitably deal the principle a death-blow; for authority does not rest upon grounds. Lamennais' doctrine, which at first sight seemed so favourable to autocracy, proved on closer inspection to be extremely democratic. The whole edifice rested upon the principle of the authority of the human race. But beneath this fundamental idea--the authority of the human race--another was perceptible; and what was this other but the idea so repugnant to the reactionaries, Rousseau's old idea--_the sovereignty of the people!_ Lamennais' readers did not observe this at once; he did not see it himself; but it lay dormant there, and one fine day it awoke and was recognised by all. Lamennais desired to substitute theocracy for monarchy. But theocracy was not popular, was at any rate only popular when the word was interpreted in the sense of the old proverb: _vox populi, vox Dei_--when God's voice meant the voice of the people. The practical result of his doctrine was, then, merely the weakening of that secular authority which it asserted to be subject to the fiat of the reason of all; for the reason of all, which had at first been personified in the sovereign church, was very soon personified in the sovereign people. When Lamennais at last, in _Les Paroles d'un Croyant_, instigated to intellectual revolt, all the difference in his position was that he now desired theocracy for the sake of the people, instead of, as formerly, for the sake of their rulers.