Both as mystic and as patriot, he had the reformer’s passion: a measure, too, of the reformer’s violence and intolerant zeal. He worked for a sweeter and a saner world, a restoration to man of his lost inheritance. The modern France, he felt, was wrong. It had lost its hold upon realities; mistaken its professors and scientists for apostles, its codes and systems for truth, its political institutions for liberty, the “triumphs of civilization” for perdurable goods. It had lost freshness, naïveté, hope: had sacrificed beauty and joy for an imaginary progress and comfort. In the place of the ancient types of human worth, the primitive yet august figures of parent and child, craftsman and tiller of the soil, it had produced the bemused victim of modern education “avec sa tête de carton et son cœur de bazar.” In this perversion of life and cultivation of the second-best he saw the “universal evil,” which poisons the sources of human happiness. Yet behind and within it Péguy, visionary and optimist, discerned the possible restoration of good; mankind brought back into contact with the real and eternal world. He saw his beloved France ceasing to be “un peuple qui dit non,” and becoming, by intensity and harmony of action and vision, “une race affirmative.” He looked past shams, pretences, and bad workmanship to a heaven that should contain not only people but things: “Dans le paradis tel que je le montrerai, il n’y aura pas seulement des âmes; il y aura des choses. Tout ce qui existe et qui est réussi. Les cathédrales, par exemple. Notre Dame, Chartres, je les y mettrai.”