His Christianity is an entirely external thing. He is a Christian as a man is a Protectionist or a Free-trader, on grounds of general theoretical conviction. His Christianity is a Christianity without brotherly love--nay, it is a Christianity without Christ as saviour and reconciler. In it Christ is only the sanguinary sacrifice demanded by the offended Deity--like Iphigenia or Jephthah's daughter. Faguet has aptly said that De Maistre's Christianity is "fear, passive obedience, and state religion." It is a Christianity which does not originate in Jerusalem, but in Rome; and he himself "is something in the nature of an officer of the Pope's bodyguard." The most ardent assailant of the spirit and philosophy of the eighteenth century, the century in which he was born, has this in common with it, that he is destitute of the proper apprehension of history. He would fain ignore the eighteenth century, just as it was fain to ignore the Middle Ages. He is the counterpart of the woman who represented the goddess of reason--he is the man who represents the principle of authority pure and simple, without any historical qualification. And at heart he is as devoid of religious feeling as the century which he attacks in the name of revealed religion. Hard and cold, with a sarcastic and at times a cruel expression on his countenance, but noble in character and strong of will, he stands at the threshold of the new century like--if not the good, at least the best spirit of the great, universal reaction. There is no possibility of confusing him with the dwarfish figures who during the course of the century have diluted his ideas, taken the sap and strength out of his thoughts, and torn and twisted his doctrines in order to oppress and dissemble under cover of them. Joseph de Maistre was a mind, these others have only been bodies. He was a man without baseness and without hypocrisy, a colonel of the Papal Zouaves as _litterateur_, the most soldierlike and the most attractive figure which the reactionary camp of the century has to show. [1] _Du Pape_, pp. 160, 174, 383. [2] Joseph de Maistre, _Considérations sur la France; Lettres et opuscules_, i., ii; _Correspondance diplomatique_, i., ii.; _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, i., ii; _Du Pape; De l'Église Gallicane; Examen de la philosophie de Bacon,_ i., ii.; Margerée, _Le Comte J. de Maistre_; E. Faguet, _Politiques et moralistes du 19me siècle_. VI Bonald Side by side with Joseph de Maistre stands Bonald, the famous medieval schoolmaster of the European reaction, a man with the same bent of mind and the same practical aims, but as monotonous as De Maistre is versatile, as conventional as De Maistre is wittily fantastic.