46 ROYAL 80CIETY OF CANADA 



de l'oraison. Elle s'adresse eusuite à votre intelligence et à votre cœur 

 par ses formules; et si vous vous laissez pénétrer par cette influence, 

 ejle vous conduira jusqu'au plus haut degré de la prière, le ravissement 

 et l'extase." Tliis is an opinion ol to-day, calmly given for^ while 

 France was in the thick of tlie debates on the Associations Bill in a 

 Eadical Chamber of Deputies. Chateaubriand was nearer their own 

 day ; so near, in fact, that he was among the pioneers of the renaissance 

 of wonder in literature» — a renaissance which his Géîiie du Christianisme 

 applied to the scriptures of the Church. We re-open the little livre 

 d'offices, read A^àth him a few hMuns and prayers, and are fain to confess 

 " qu'une langue antique et mystérieuse (celle de Virgile et de Cicéix>n) 

 une langue qui ne varie plus avec les siècles, convenait assez bien au 

 culte de l'être étemel, incompréhensible, immuable." 



But Chateaubriand is no longer an accepted expositor: he is not 

 scientific enough for an evolutionary generation. Yet his famous book 

 served its day well, revived a cultured interest in the liturgy, and preached 

 a series of excellent lay sermons from a Christian reading of Keats's 

 text: 



Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all 

 Ye know on eartii, and all ye need to know. 



Then, by the time the literary revival of the liturgy was waning the 

 scientific began. This went straight to root-and-bnanch questions of 

 evolution, environment, ajccreiion, and the survival of the fittest. And 

 now science and literature alike acknowledge the supreme fitness of 

 bible and liturgies to fill a foremost place in both the intellectual and 

 imaginative Mfe. Yet it's a far cry from the convent to fthe Modern 

 Reader's Bille, and it will be many a day before the Papal revision of 

 the Vulgate supplies the half-way house. 



However, the essential point is the full and frank recognition of 

 the value of bible and liturgy as source-books of science and art in the 

 life-hisitory of man. M. Loisy is hardly persona gratissima inside the 

 cloisters; but what Ursuline would not agree with this sentence from his 

 L'Evangile et l'Eglise : " Le développement historique du culte accuse 

 un effort persévérant du christianisme pour pénétrer de son esprit toute 

 rexistence de l'homme." Or with Eenan's dictum: "La religion d'un 

 peuple, étant l'expression la plus complète de son individualité, est en 

 un sens plus instructive que son histoire." Or with Huysmans' artistic 

 sensibility to Gregorian chants, while he was En Route towards Catlio- 

 licism:"la paraphrase aérienne eft mouvante de l'immobile structure 

 (les cathédrales." ]For would they not triumphantly point to the great 

 TertuUian as the archetype and prophet of all these latter-day culti- 



