humanity." _Sacramenta, propter homines_; the Church was made for man,
and not man for the Church. Given the dilemma, who shall blame his
choice? But the dilemma was purely subjective and imaginary. Though
truths are never irreconcilable, the exaggerations of truth may well
be so.

Had he possessed that intellectual patience in perplexity, without which
not only faith, but true science, is impossible, he would have been
driven not to apostasy, but to a careful re-sifting of his views,
issuing, perhaps, in a reconciliation of apparently adverse positions,
or at all events in a confession of subjective, uncertainty and
confusion. Faith, in the wider sense of the word, would have bid him to
believe, without seeing, what we have lived to see under Leo XIII.

This seems to be the intellectual aspect of his defection, though of
course there were many accelerating causes at work. Perhaps if Gregory
XVI. had met his appeal with a few words of simple explanation and
advice, instead of with that mysterious reticence which is falsely
supposed to be the soul of diplomacy, the issue might have been as happy
as it was miserable. De Lamennais himself, in his _Affaires de Rome_,
makes the same remark in so many words. Again, the illiberal and
ungenerous persecution of his triumphant adversaries, who endeavoured to
goad him into some open act of rebellion in order to bring him under
still heavier condemnation, can scarcely have failed to embitter and
harden a soul naturally disposed to pessimism and melancholy. Nor can we
omit from the influences at work upon him, that dramatic instinct which
makes a mediocre and colourless attitude impossible for those who are
strongly under its influence. Perhaps no nation is more governed by it
than the French, with their partiality for _tableaux_ and _sensation_;
and in De Lamennais its presence was most marked, as the pages of his
_Paroles_ will witness. In the _Too Late_ with which he received the
overtures of Pius IX.; in the studied sensationalism of his funeral
arrangements, and in many other minute points, we are made sensible that
if his life culminated in a tragedy, the tragic aspect of it was not
altogether displeasing to him. Still it would be a grievous slur on so
great a character to suppose that such a weakness could have had any
considerable part in his steady and deliberate refusal to see a priest
at the last. This is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that he
believed he could