“Les armes de Jésus, c’est la pauvre famille, Les frères et la sœur, les garçons et la fille, Le fuseau lourd de laine et la savante aiguille.” But he found in the French socialism of the ’nineties a dry and materialistic spirit; which could not satisfy his passionate idealism, his instinct for a completed life, a universal redemption, that should harmonize soul and body and fulfil their needs. Hence, by a process too gradual to be called a conversion, he grew from humanitarianism into a somewhat anti-clerical, original, yet mediæval and mystical Catholicism; in which those ideals and demands which had dominated his humanitarian period—the sense of the rights and dignity of mankind, the longing to save, “de porter remède au mal universel humain”—reappear in a spiritualized form. In Christianity he saw condensed the saving power of Spirit; never letting man alone, but redeeming him even in defiance of his own will, contriving its victories by or in spite of the evils and disharmonies of life. The belief which he achieved—doubtless fed by childish memories—was absolute and literal, and most easily expressed itself in mediæval forms. Modernism filled him with horror; he desired no attenuation of the supernatural, no reinterpretation of dogma. The faith which fought the crusades and built the Cathedrals was that in which he felt at home, and which he believed himself destined to bring back to the soul of France: “Au fond, c’est une renaissance Catholique qui se fait par moi.”