M. Le Hir was in an equally eminent degree a savant and a saint.  This co-habitation in the same person, of two entities which are rarely found together, took place in him without any kind of fraction, for the saintly side of his character had the absolute mastery.  There was not one of the objections of rationalism which escaped his attention.  He did not make the slightest concession to any of them, for he never felt the shadow of a doubt as to the truth of orthodoxy.  This was due rather to an act of the supreme will than to a result imposed upon him.  Holding entirely aloof from natural philosophy and the scientific spirit, the first condition of which is to have no prior faith and to reject that which does not come spontaneously, he remained in a state of equilibrium which would have been fatal to convictions less urgent than his.  The supernatural did not excite any natural repugnance in him.  His scales were very nicely adjusted, but in one of them was a weight of unknown quantity—­an unshaken faith.  Whatever might have been placed in the other, would have seemed light; all the objections in the world would not have moved it a hairsbreadth.

M. Le Hir’s superiority was in a great measure due to his profound knowledge of the German exegeses.  Whatever he found in them compatible with Catholic orthodoxy, he appropriated.  In matters of critique, incompatibilities were continually occurring, but in grammar, upon the other hand, there was no difficulty in finding common ground.  There was no one like M. Le Hir in this respect.  He had thoroughly mastered the doctrine of Gesenius and Ewald, and criticised many points in it with great learning.  He interested himself in the Phoenician inscriptions, and propounded a very ingenious theory which has since been confirmed.  His theology was borrowed almost entirely from the German Catholic School, which was at once more advanced, and less reasonable, than our ancient French scholasticism.  M. Le Hir reminds one in many respects of Dollinger, especially in regard to his learning and his general scope of view; but his docility would have preserved him from the dangers in which the Vatican Council involved most of the learned members of the clergy.  He died prematurely in 1870 upon the eve of the Council which he was just about to attend as a theologian.  I was intending to ask my colleagues in the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres to make him an unattached member of our body.  I have no doubt that he would have rendered considerable service to the Committee of Semitic Inscriptions.

M. Le Hir possessed, in addition to his immense learning, the talent of writing with much force and accuracy.  He might have been very witty if he had been so minded.  His undeviating mysticism resembled that of M. Gottofrey; but he had much more rectitude of judgment.  His aspect was very singular, for he was like a child in figure, and very weakly in appearance, but with that, eyes and a forehead indicating the highest intelligence.