Thus in Chateaubriand's imagination the Trinity is upborne by the three Graces as Caryatides. In keeping with this is his attempt to prove the divine origin of the cross from the existence of the constellation, the Southern Cross.
In keeping with his defence of Christian dogma is such a defence of the Christian form of worship as the following: "Speaking generally, we may answer that the rites of Christianity are in the highest degree moral, if for no other reason than that they have been practised by our fathers, that our mothers have watched over our cradles as Christian women, that the Christian religion has chanted its psalms over our parents' coffins and invoked peace upon them in their graves." If argument were required when it is perfectly self-evident that the same defence may be offered for any religion, we might urge that it is a very unsuitable one in this particular case, where the object in view was to induce sons to abjure the anti-Christian beliefs professed by their fathers.
No less droll are the arguments drawn from natural history to prove the love displayed in the order of the universe. Chateaubriand writes: "Is an alligator, is a serpent, is a tiger less loving to its young than a nightingale, a hen, or even a woman?... Is it not as wonderful as it is touching to see an alligator build a nest and lay eggs like a hen, and a little monster come out of the shell just like a chicken? How many touching truths are contained in this strange contrast! how it leads us to love the goodness of God!"
Chateaubriand is positively jocose in his attempts to prove the divine purpose evident in nature. He declares that the birds of passage come to us at a season when the earth yields no crops on purpose to be fed; and he maintains that the domestic animals are born with exactly the amount of instinct required to enable us to tame them.
When the Neo-Catholic authors embark on any subject connected with natural science, they at once become extremely comic. Any one interested should read (in his review of Bonald's _La législation primitive_) Chateaubriand's outburst of horror at having heard a little boy answer his teacher's question: What is man? with the words: A mammal. And in the same spirit De Maistre repeatedly asserts that the whole science of chemistry requires to be placed on a different, a religious basis, or declares his conviction that some honest scientist will certainly succeed in proving that it is not the moon, but God, who produces the ebb and flow of the tide, as also that water, which is an element, cannot be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. He is of opinion that birds are a living proof of the incorrectness of the law of gravitation. In this connection one of the characters in his _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_ remarks that there is more of the supernatural in birds than in other animals, a fact witnessed to by the signal honour shown them in the choice of the dove to represent the Holy Spirit. That alligators should lay eggs, that birds should fly--such feats are miracles in the eyes of the Neo-Catholics.