It is on account of this frankness that St. Sulpice represents all that is most upright in religion.  No attenuation of the dogmas of Scripture was allowed at St. Sulpice; the fathers, the councils, and the doctors were looked upon as the sources of Christianity.  Proof of the divinity of Christ was not sought in Mohammed or the battle of Marengo.  These theological buffooneries, which by force of impudence and eloquence extorted admiration in Notre-Dame, had no 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.  St. Sulpice is now the only place where, as formerly at Port-Royal, the style