M. de Lamennais hesitated, for a while, over his literary vocation, or at least, over the direction it should take. The solitude in which he had lived, by the sea, had filled his soul with floating dreams, like those beauteous clouds he had often watched with his outward eyes in the depths of the heavens. He was within an ace of writing novels and works of fiction; he did even get so far as to write some poetry, which, of course, he never published. Here are two lines, which entered, as far as I can remember, into a description of scholastic theology-- "Elle avait deux grands yeux stupidement ouverts, Dont l'un ne voyait pas ou voyait de travers!" M. de Lamennais then became a religious writer and a philosopher more from force of circumstances than from inclination. His taste, he assured us in his moments of expansion, upon which we look back with respect and pride, would have led him by preference towards that style of poetical prose-writing which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had made fashionable in _Paul et Virginie_, and Chateaubriand in _René._ So he communed with himself and, with the unerring finger of the implacable genius of the born observer, he touched upon the wound of his century--indifference to religious matters. Surely the cry uttered by that gloomy storm-bird, "the gods are departing!" had good reason for startling the pious folk and statesmen of that period! Were not the churches filled with missions and the high roads crowded with missionaries? Was there not the cross of Migné, the miracles of the Prince of Hohenlohe, the apparitions and trances of Martin de Gallardon and others? What, then, could this man mean? M. de Lamennais took, as the motto for his book, these words from the Bible-- "_Impius, cum in profundum venerit contemnit._" In his opinion, contempt was the sign by which he recognised the decline of religious feeling. The seventeenth century believed, the eighteenth denied, the nineteenth doubted.