What most interests us, who are confining our attention to the first stage of Lamennais' psychological development, is to observe the manner in which his childish faith in authority is undermined as soon as he has the opportunity of seeing the holy thing close at hand. He writes from Rome in a private letter: "The Pope is pious, and has the best intentions; but he has little knowledge of the world, and is completely ignorant of the condition of the church and of society; he sits immovable in the darkness which closes in ever thicker round him, weeping and praying; his task, his mission is to prepare and hasten the final catastrophes which must precede the regeneration of society, and without which this regeneration would either be impossible or incomplete. Therefore God has given him into the hands of men who are as base as it is possible to be. Ambitious, greedy, and depraved, in their foolish frenzy they call on the Tatars to produce in Europe what they call _order_."
Is it not a remarkable coincidence that Lamennais, too, should end by finding a stumbling-block in the word which had determined the intellectual development of the whole generation? Victor Hugo in his endeavour to vindicate the principle of authority in matters of taste at last feels himself obliged to criticise and enlarge the idea of order; Lamennais in his battle for Catholicism is compelled to do the same. With what passionate grief does he describe in his letters the corruption which he finds prevailing amongst the props and pillars of _order_ in Rome!
"Catholicism was my life, because it is the life of humanity; my desire was to defend it, and to rescue it from the abyss into which it is sinking deeper every day. Nothing would have been easier. It did not suit the bishops that I should do it. There remained Rome. To Rome I went, and there I saw the most shameful sewer that has ever defiled the sight of man. The gigantic _cloaca_ of the Tarquinii would be too strait for so much filth. No god but self-interest reigns there; they would sell nations, sell the human race, sell the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, for a piece of ground and a few piastres."
Such was the appearance at close quarters of the power whose most dauntless knight Lamennais had been. Was it any wonder that he turned round! Was it any wonder that he, like the priests of the ancient Saxons to whom Renan has compared him, cut down with a well-directed blow of his axe the divinity to whose altar he had summoned the reluctant world!