In this sudden subversion of all things, in the presence of a republic extemporized upon the ruins of three monarchies--the monarchy of glory, the monarchy of tradition, and the monarchy of public opinion--in the midst of this nation, suddenly insurgent and beyond either its aim or expectation sovereign, what became of the Church? What did its ministers? If some of them participated in the current dreams, certainly the majority were full of anguish and alarm; they did not combat the new institutions; they did not pretend to exercise any influence for or against any party; they sought only to purify the Republic by securing in it a place for Religion; they did not stand aloof from the people; they showed themselves, in its great assemblages and in its fêtes, planting the cross of Jesus by the side of the tree of liberty. {101} Never did the Church stand so aloof from politics; never was she more modest in her attitude; never less exacting--I will not say more obsequious, as far as the Government or the public was concerned; never more absorbed with her mission of piety and morality, whatever the Government of France might be, and whoever her masters. And what in their turn was the conduct of the people toward the Church? I do not mean to say that they confided in her, or showed her much affection. The popular movement in 1848 was no doubt far from being religious; and the ideas, acts, and language which proceeded from it every instant, were well calculated to disturb and sadden the hearts of Christians; but religion and its ministers were in no respect ill treated, insulted, or persecuted; their forms of worship were not interrupted: when they showed themselves out of doors, they were received with respect; and at the sight of a virtuous archbishop mortally wounded in the streets, in the very endeavor to appease the civil war by the exhibition of the cross, a painful stupor seized the people; a pang of remorse and of shame traversed those masses of disbelievers at the sight of a martyr. {102} It was clear that in the interval between 1830 and 1848, although the Christian Church had not aroused in the people either faith or sympathy, that Church had at least won liberty and peace. When the revolutionary fever had subsided, when the Republic had given itself a chief, and was waiting for a master, it was no longer in the street, by popular impressions, but in the Assemblies, and by the constituted authorities, that the great questions of the day were put and were solved. There, too, the progress, which the Catholic Church had made, became immediately evident, and its gains were ascertained. It counted at this moment among its most zealous servants a man new to public affairs, who had entered political life as an adherent of the Legitimist Opposition to the Monarchy of 1830, a man who accepted the Republic, and had acquired in a few days a just renown by his courageous resistance to anarchy. {103}