Lamennais was not a “modernist,” as this term is now understood, for his theology was orthodox. His fight with the Vatican was for freedom in the relations of the Church to society. He pleaded in his _Essai sur L’indifference en Matière de Religion_ for the Church to accept the principle of freedom, to leave the cherished fondling of the royalist cause, and to present to the world the principles of a Christian democracy. Lamennais and other liberal-minded men desired the separation of Church and State, and were tolerant of those who were not Catholic. They claimed, along with their own “right to believe,” that of others “not to believe.” His was a liberal Catholicism, but its proposals frightened his co-religionists, and drew upon him in 1832 an encyclical letter (_Mirari vos_) from the Vatican. The Pope denounced liberalism absolutely as an absurd and an erroneous doctrine, a piece of folly sprung from the “fetid source of indifferentism.” Lamennais found he could not argue, as Renan himself later put it, “with a bar of iron.” It was the reactionary De Maistre, with his principle of papal authority,[3] and not Lamennais, whom the Vatican, naturally enough, chose to favour, or rather to follow. [3] As stated in _Du Pape_, 1819. Thus Lamennais found himself, by an almost natural and inevitable process, outside the Church, and this in spite of the fact that his theology was orthodox. He endeavoured to present his case in his paper _L’Avenir_ and in an influential brochure, _The Words of a Believer_, which left its mark upon Hugo, Michelet, Lamartine, and George Sand. His views blended with the current of humanitarian and democratic doctrines which developed from the Saint-Simonists, Pierre Leroux and similar thinkers. We have already noted that these social reformers held to their beliefs with the conviction that in them and not in the Roman Church lay salvation. This brings us to a crucial point which is the clue to much of the subsequent thought upon religion. This is the profound and seemingly irreconcilable difference between these two conceptions of religion.