In spite of his æsthetic bias, Chateaubriand sets to work with a good deal of pedantry. Celibacy, as enjoined on the Catholic priesthood, is considered first from the moral point of view, and, thus considered, is denominated the most moral of institutions. A second chapter, with the somewhat comical title: "Virginity, considered from the poetical point of view," is devoted to the same subject. It ends with the following burst of eloquence: "Thus we see that virginity, beginning in the lowest link of the chain of beings (its significance among animals had been taken into consideration), makes its way upwards to man, from man to the angels, and from the angels to God, to lose itself in Him." In the original edition, as if this were not enough, there was added: "God is the great solitary, the eternal celibate of the universe." It is curious that no notice should be taken of His paternal relation to the second person of the Trinity. But this omission makes the appeal to the case of the Saviour the more effective. Chateaubriand says: "The law-giver of Christianity was born of a virgin and died virgin." And to this he adds: "Did he not intend thereby to teach us that the earth, as regarded human beings, was now, both for political and natural reasons, sufficiently populated, and that, far from multiplying the race, we ought rather to restrict its increase?" We are struck dumb by finding Malthus's theory of population come out as the sum and end of this Christian Romanticism. Who would have believed that there was so much political economy in the Gospels! On the subject of the Trinity we read: "In nature the number 3 seems to be the number superior to all others; it is not a product; hence Pythagoras calls it the number without a mother. Even in the doctrines of polytheistic religions we here and there come upon a dim intuition of the Trinity. The Graces chose its number as theirs." Thus in Chateaubriand's imagination the Trinity is upborne by the three Graces as Caryatides. In keeping with this is his attempt to prove the divine origin of the cross from the existence of the constellation, the Southern Cross. In keeping with his defence of Christian dogma is such a defence of the Christian form of worship as the following: "Speaking generally, we may answer that the rites of Christianity are in the highest degree moral, if for no other reason than that they have been practised by our fathers, that our mothers have watched over our cradles as Christian women, that the Christian religion has chanted its psalms over our parents' coffins and invoked peace upon them in their graves." If argument were required when it is perfectly self-evident that the same defence may be offered for any religion, we might urge that it is a very unsuitable one in this particular case, where the object in view was to induce sons to abjure the anti-Christian beliefs professed by their fathers.