The success of the book was immense. France, agitated by vast and conflicting problems, a Babel wherein many voices were speaking simultaneously, in every kind of tongue, the France of the Empire, of the Restoration, of Carbonarism, of Liberalism and of Republicanism, held its peace to listen to the weighty and inspired utterance of this unknown writer: "_et siluit terra in conspectu ejus!_" The voice came from the desert. Who had seen, who knew this man? He had dropped from the region where eagles dwell; his name was mentioned by all lips, in the same breath with that of Bossuet. _L'Essai sur l'indifférence_ was little read but much admired; the poets--they are the only people who read--recognised in it a powerful imagination, at times almost an affrighted imagination, which, both by its excesses and its terrors, hugged, as it were, the dead body of religious belief, and shook it roughly, hoping against hope, to bring it back to life again. Of all prose-writers, Tacitus was the one whom the Abbé de Lamennais admired the most; of all poets, Dante was the one he read over and over again the most frequently; of all books, the one he knew by heart was the Bible. Now, it might assuredly have been believed that this citadel, intended to protect the weak walls of Catholicism, _L'Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, was viewed with favourable eyes by the French clergy; no such thing! Quite the contrary; a cry went up from the heart of the Church, not of joy or admiration, but of terror. They were scared by the genius of the man; religion was no longer in the habit of having an Origen, a Tertullian, or a Bossuet to defend it; it was afraid of being supported by such a defender and, little by little, the shudder of fear reached even as far as Rome; and the book was very nearly placed on the _Index._ These suspicions were aroused by the nature of the arguments of which the author made use to repel the attacks of philosophers. The Abbé de Lamennais foresaw, through the gloom, the causes at work undermining the old edifice of orthodoxy, and tried to put it on a wider basis of toleration and to prop it up, as he himself expressed it, by the exercise of common sense. To this end he made incredible flights into metaphysical realms, to prove that Catholicism was, and always had been, the religion of Humanity.