At all epochs and in all parties some man is always met with in whom are centered and personified whatever good sense, sound views, and wise purposes there are in the party to which he belongs. Such a man under the Restoration and for the lay Legitimists was M. de Villèle. True to his friends, he nevertheless knew, or I should rather say he promptly learned in public life to understand, what France then actually was, and what qualities, to be successful, her government should possess. If he had had toward his party and his king as much independence and firmness in action as he had correct appreciation in thought, he might perhaps have obtained a more complete and more lasting success. The clergy on their side also had at this epoch a faithful representative of whatever religious or political sagacity existed in the French Church: it is here to the Abbé Frayssinous, Bishop of Hermopolis, that the honor and the merit belong. His task was far easier than that of M. de Villèle, for he was never put to any trial: he had no struggle to sustain; he remained naturally, or kept himself voluntarily, out of the arena of events and of parties; but it was in this precisely that he showed his good sense, and his correct appreciation of the permanent interests and the real dispositions of the clergy of his time. {81} Neither as theologian, nor as orator, nor as statesman was the Abbé Frayssinous a man of eminence, or remarkable for power of intellect; but in the different phases of his career, in his personal conduct, and in his writings, he had an unerring instinct of what was just and possible, and showed no common tact in retiring with dignity from untenable positions, and escaping from questions that he could not settle. Upon these occasions he would confine himself to his mission of a priest and moralist of the Christian religion. From 1803 to 1822 he held, suspended, and resumed in the Church of St. Sulpice, his "conferences upon religious subjects;" remarkable not only by a judicious defense of the great truths of Christianity, but by a continuous, although somewhat timorous, effort to place the doctrines of the Church in harmony with the principles of natural justice and of civil liberty. {82} He was not, like the Père Lacordaire or M. de Montalembert, a Catholic Liberal; he was a priest--moderate and equitable, not from luke-warmness in his faith, but from respect to legal rights and human sentiments. Although his "conferences" had not the success and popularity that distinguished later, in Notre-Dame, those of the Père Lacordaire, they attracted a numerous auditory, and exercised material influence in giving to the awakening of Christianity a wider range and a firmer basis. [Footnote 11]