The Abbé Lacordaire had soon to feel the danger and to repel with sorrow the yoke of this seductive friendship. The errors and the evil passions of the Abbé de la Mennais were not long in exploding; his was a mind lofty and powerful, but without grasp, without foresight, without moderation, and without equity; incapable of discerning the different sides of a subject and of embracing all the elements of the problem demanding solution, he was a haughty slave to the truth that he served but partially, and the somber enemy of every one who wounded his pride by contesting his opinions. {48} He gave to the _Avenir_ a character at once democratic and theocratic, imperious and revolutionary. All the ideas contrary to his own, all the institutions, all the governments, that stood in his way, were attacked by him with a degree of vehemence, insult, and menace never surpassed by any political partisan, however violent. The maxims of the Gallican Church were, to cite his words, "an object of disgust and horror; opinions as odious as they were base, which, while rendering even the conscience the accomplice of tyranny, make servility a duty and brute force an independent and just right." He demanded the separation of Church and State as a necessity absolute and urgent; "for," said he, "we regard as abolished and of no effect every particular law which contradicts the Charter, and is incompatible with the liberties that _it_ proclaims. {49} In the event of such law, we believe that it becomes immediately and without delay the duty of government to come to an understanding with the pope, and to rescind the Concordat, which lost all the means of being executed from the instant when, thank God, the Catholic religion ceased to be a state religion." Four months had scarcely elapsed since the birth of the government of July, and because the liberty of teaching promised by the Charter of 1830 was not already in vigor, the Abbé de la Mennais said to the Catholics: "Whence comes the oppression that weighs upon us? Either, in what concerns us, the government cannot or it will not keep its promises. If it cannot, what is this mockery of a sovereignty, this miserable phantom of government, and what have we to do with it? It is as far as we are concerned as if it were _not_, and nothing remains to us but to forget it, and seek our safety in ourselves. {50} Let us proclaim aloud who the powers are that are hostile to us; whose servants seek only to satisfy blindly their thirst for persecution." What attacks leveled at a government were ever more precipitate, more violent, and showed a less just appreciation of facts? What revolutionary party ever proclaimed with greater audacity disobedience to the laws, and insurrection as the first of rights and of duties?