But his activities were not destructive; Montalvo was a believer in the manner of the revolutionists of 1848. "A sane and pure democracy has need of Jesus Christ," he wrote in his liberal enthusiasm; he loved Christianity because it was the religion of the democracy. Democracy would be the law of the nations "if some day the spirit of the Gospel were to prevail." He eulogised the stoicism and virtue of the Roman Republic, in the image of which he wished to construct the Chilian democracy, and in a magnificent essay he exalted the nobility of these qualities. He was not a radical like Bilbao; a forerunner of pragmatism, he accepted all useful ideas, even Catholicism, so that it did not become a political tyranny. "There is nothing to be gained by attacking certain beliefs," he wrote, "which by virtue of being general and useful to all will eventually become verities, even if the curious and courageous investigation of bygone things could constitute a motive for doubting them."
An American thinker, he applied Latin ideas to { 241} the affairs of the continent. In his _Seven Treaties_, his capital work, are some superb passages upon the heroes of South American emancipation. His cult was that of Carlyle, religious and full of lyrical passion. "In what is he inferior to the great men of antiquity?" he asks of Bolivar. "Only in this, that no long centuries flow between us, for only time, the great master, can distil in his magic laboratory the chrism with which the princes of nature are anointed." He traces a parallel between Bolivar and Napoleon, between Bolivar and Washington. "In Napoleon there is something more than in other men; a sense, a wheel in the mechanism of understanding, a fibre in the heart. He looks across the world from the Apennines to the Pillars of Hercules, from the pyramids of Egypt to the snows of Russia. Kings tremble, pallid, and half-lifeless; thrones crack and crumble; the nations look up and regard him and are afraid, and bend the knee before the giant." Montalvo admires Napoleon, but he judges Bolivar the superior, because the work of the former was destroyed by mankind, while the work of the latter still prospers. "He who realises great and lasting undertakings is greater than he who realises only great and ephemeral things."