This is the standpoint of Chateaubriand's youth, but one to which he did not long adhere. He was too much the born doubter to be able to hold firmly to even a negative conviction. What there was of faith in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, namely, its belief in the steady progress of humanity, was probably what he first rejected, and on the loss of this conviction quickly followed the loss of all the rest. He himself attributes his conversion to the influence of his mother's dying prayer to him to keep to her faith. "I wept and believed," he says. Himself converted, or half converted, by means of sentiment, he now endeavoured to influence others in the same manner. Although intellectual receptivity for the dogmas of Christianity was no longer to be looked for, it was surely still possible to arouse sympathy with its touching, noble poetry. It was an idea characteristic of both the period and the man, this of transforming the apology for Christianity into aesthetics. He devotes a whole chapter to the sweet, melodious music of the church bells. He describes the simple village church, with its feeling of innocence and peace. He presents us with pictures and symbols when we expect proofs. Bonald remarked that in books which were works of reason, such as his own, truth displayed itself like a king at the head of his army on the day of battle, while in books like Chateaubriand's _Génie du Christianisme_ it had more resemblance to a queen on her coronation day, surrounded with everything magnificent and beautiful that could be got together. His meaning is that Chateaubriand aims rather at moving men than at convincing them. In private conversation he expressed himself more bluntly. He said: "I gave my pills as they were; he gave his with sugar." Certainly no book affords a clearer indication of the want of serious reality in the religious regeneration of the day. Its point of view is that which men have agreed to call the romantic. It is to the past it turns, and as the Romanticist is a man of imagination, he sees the past in an imaginary light. The religion of the Romanticist is a parade religion, a tool for the politician, a lyre for the poet, a symbol for the philosopher, a fashion for the man of the world. Like the German, the Danish, and, at a later period, the French Romanticists, Chateaubriand loves the mysterious. He begins his vindication of belief in authority by appealing to men's sense of mystery in life generally: "There is nothing beautiful or sweet or great in life that is not mysterious. The most wonderful feelings are those which at once move and perplex us. Bashfulness, chaste love, pure friendship, are full of mystery.... Is not innocence, which in its essence is nothing but holy ignorance, the most ineffable mystery? Women, the more admirable half of the human race, cannot live without mysteries." The transition from this to the dogmas of a so-called revealed religion strikes us as sudden.