Whatever the cause of this acquired serenity, Delsarte did not always refuse to satisfy his native impulses.  I have already alluded to cases in which these returns to impetuous vivacity occurred, and how he rose above these relapses.  Whether his peaceful spirit arose from religious feeling, or whether it was the result of moral strength, it breathed the spirit of the gospel; but it must also be confessed that our artist mingled with it much worldly grace.  What matters it?  Uncertainty has no inconveniences in such a matter.

It was particularly on the occasion of those sudden fits of passion to which the human conscience does not always attach due weight, that Delsarte laid great stress upon supernatural intervention.

Oh! what would he have done without that powerful aid, with his lively sensibilities—­with his too loving heart?

I have no opinion to offer in regard to the shield which efficacious grace and the palladium of the faith may form for dangerous tendencies; for Catholics, that is a matter for the casuist or the confessor to decide; but, as far as Delsarte is concerned, had he beaten down Satan in a way to rouse the jealousy of St. Michael, had he made the heathen Socrates give precedence to him in patience, wisdom and firmness, I should regard that victory as the triumph of the sacred principles of the eternal morality, of that which sums up, in a single group, all the supreme precepts of all religions and all philosophies, rather than as a result of external practices.

It is by placing myself at this culminating point, that I have succeeded in explaining to my own satisfaction the true stimulus of the artist-thinker, in spite of all appearances and all contradictions; and everything leads me to believe that the elevation of his mind and the inspiration of the art which he taught and practiced, would have sufficed, in equal proportion with his faith, “to deliver him from evil.”

How could a man glide into the lower walks of life, whose mission it was to set forth the types of moral beauty by opposing them, to use his phrase, “to the hideousnesses of vice?”

Now, talent and faith meet face to face.  We are to consider to what extent the one was dependent upon the other; and whether, in reality, the artist whom so many voices proclaimed “incomparable” owed his vast superiority to acts of religious devotion, to his adhesion to the dogmas of the church.

It is not arbitrarily that a transcendent intellect pointed out a difference between religion and religions:  every mind devoted to philosophy must needs reach this distinction.

I shall keep strictly within the limits of that which concerns art, in a question so vast and of such great importance.

Religion is that need which all generations of men have felt for establishing a relationship between man and the supreme power or powers whence man supposes he proceeded.  To some it is an outburst of gratitude and homage; to others, an instinct of terror which makes them fall prostrate before an unknown being upon whom they feel themselves dependent, although they cannot know him, still less define him.