The method by which he achieved this end should be given in his own words: "I read every day one or two chapters of the Bible. I discover new beauties daily, and prostrate myself before this admirable book; while at the age of twenty I found it difficult not to think the family of Lot unworthy to be saved, Noah unworthy to have lived, Saul a great criminal, and David a terrible man. At twenty I tried to understand the Apocalypse; now I am sure that I never shall understand it. At the age of twenty a deep and long-continued search in the Holy Books made me an Atheist after the fashion of Alembert and Lalande; or a Christian after that of Chateaubriand. Now I believe and do not criticize. Accustomed to occupy myself with great moral questions, what have I not accomplished or allowed to be wrought out, before arriving at the point where the Pope and my Curé begged me to accept from them the most portable edition of the Bible? Is it bold in me to take for certain that among a thousand individuals chosen from the men of which the people are composed, there will be found, owing to their intellectual faculties, their education, or their age, very few who have arrived at the point where I find myself?" This statement of his attitude of mind is taken from a letter written to remonstrate with the Russian Ambassador on the patronage afforded by the Emperor Alexander to the Bible Societies. But how much more would such an attitude of mind lead him to look with repugnance on the religious excitement which was displaying itself even in the Arch Duchy of Austria! And, to say the truth, men of far deeper religious feeling than Metternich might well be dissatisfied with the influence of the person who was the chief mover in this excitement. The Baroness de Krüdener, formerly one of the gayest of Parisian ladies of fashion, and at least suspected of not having been too scrupulous in her conduct, had gone through the process which Carlyle so forcibly describes in his sketch of Ignatius Loyola. She had changed the excitements of the world for the excitements of religion, and was now preaching and prophesying a millennium of good things to come in another world, to those who would abandon some of the more commonplace amusements of the present. The disturbance which she was producing in men's minds specially alarmed Metternich; and, under what influence it may be difficult to prove, she was induced to retire to Russia, and there came in contact with the excitable Czar.