such effect
upon these serious-minded Christians. They never thought that the
dogma had any need to be toned down, veiled, or dressed up to suit
the taste of modern France. They showed themselves deficient in the
critical faculty in supposing that the Catholicism of the theologians
was the self-same religion of Jesus and the prophets; but they did not
invent for the use of the worldly, a Christianity revised and adapted
to their ideas. This is why the serious study--may I even add, the
reform--of Christianity is more likely to proceed from St. Sulpice
than from the teachings of M. Lacordaire or M. Gratry, and _a
fortiori_, from that of M. Dupanloup, in which all its doctrines are
toned down, contorted, and blunted; in which Christianity is never
represented as it was conceived by the Council of Trent or the Vatican
Council, but as a thing without frame or bone, and with all its
essence taken from it. The conversions which are made by preaching of
this kind do no good either to religion or to the mind. Conversions of
this kind do not make Christians, but they warp the mind and unfit men
for public business. There is nothing so mischievous as the vague; it
is even worse than what is false. "Truth," as Bacon has well observed,
"is derived from error rather than from confusion."

Thus, amid the pretentious pathos which in our day has found its way
into the Christian Apologia, has been preserved a school of solid
doctrine, averse to all show and repugnant to success. Modesty has
ever been the special attribute of the Company of St. Sulpice; this is
why it has never attached any importance to literature, excluding it
almost entirely. The rule of the St. Sulpice Company is to publish
everything anonymously, and to write in the most unpretending
and retiring style possible. They see clearly the vanity, and the
drawbacks of talent, and they will have none of it. The word which
best characterises them is mediocrity, but then their mediocrity
is systematic and self-planned. Michelet has described the alliance
between the Jesuits and the Sulpicians as "a marriage between death
and vacuum." This is no doubt true, but Michelet failed to see that
in this case the vacuum is loved for its own sake. There is something
touching about a vacuum created by men who will not think for fear of
thinking ill. Literary error is in their eyes the most dangerous of
errors, and it is just on this account that they excel in the true
style of writing