outrageous and barbarous writer. A new era opened at this epoch in France for religion and for literature. {21} Christianity and systems opposed to Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Philosophy, a taste for classics, and a tendency to romanticism, unfolded themselves simultaneously, surprised to be living together, and at the same time encountering one another as ardent combatants. I have no design to retrace here their contests nor to constitute myself their judge. Let but a great arena be thrown open, and the crowd rushes in, carrying with it its confusion and its buzz. Happily, the tumult is not of long duration. In this mighty movement of men's minds in France at the commencement of the nineteenth century I occupy myself with a single grand fact--the Awakening of Christianity, its different characteristics, its different results. The crisis itself had illustrious witnesses. I will interrogate these alone. After Napoleon and Chateaubriand, the first whom I meet with are two Catholic writers, who have left behind them great and deserved reputations. M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre hoisted the banner of Christianity valiantly, and at an early date. {22} But their ideas and their writings were rather political than religious: the exigencies of public order occupied their attention far more than those of man's soul, and their works were rather attacks upon the French Revolution than a defense of the faith of Christians. By a coincidence very remarkable, although at the same time very natural, the first production of each--"The Theory of Power," by M. de Bonald, and the "Considerations on France," by M. de Maistre--was published at the same moment, in 1796, and each in a foreign land, where the authors were living as emigrants. In the first ardor of the reaction, and with the impassioned and vague feelings that it suggested, each wrote against the Revolution that shook the world and wrecked his own fortunes. Potent intelligences both, profound moralists, eminent writers; but their philosophy is a philosophy of circumstance and of party. Their theories they use as arms; their books as a discharge. {23} M. de Bonald is a lofty-minded original thinker, but subtle, too, and complex; disposed to content himself with verbal combinations and distinctions, and sparing no labor to contrive his vast web of arguments proper to entrap the unwary adversary. M. de Maistre, on the contrary, blasts him with the absoluteness of his assertion, the poignancy of his irony, the rude eloquence of his invectives. He is a powerful, a charming extemporizer. Both of them excel in seizing and presenting in a striking manner one great side, but only one of the great sides, in questions or measures. They see not these in their variety and in their entirety. Combatants approved--the one tenacious, the other impetuous--they both committed two grave faults: they instituted a closer bond between statesmanship and religion than is proper