The Press.
London, England, 1854-04-29 00:00:00

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tion, and lay bare a Jesuit with an avengin g
adroitness that might make Mr. Gladstone
shudder with nervous apprehensions. Peelite
abettors of Romanism are sure to be seized
with cold tremors on observing the manner in
which M. Bungener can rend into fragments
the cobweb tissues of Puseyite casuistry. His
talents seem to us the more admirable because
he can refute without railing, and employ the
severest logic while using a popular style
without ever sinking into the rhetoric of a
scold. Like Pascal, he appears to hold that
in controversy " one should have an interior
logic while speaking like the people." Possibly,
if M. Bungener sojourned amongst us, he
would feel that some of our Exeter-hall
theologians often do not serve our scriptural
faith, in their well-meant but not very skilful
onslaughts against the Wisemans and New-
mans of the day.
Appreciating M. Bungener as a reasoner and
thinker, we could wish that he would give up
the composition of fiction and exercise his
faculties in history and philosophy. But, as
he comes before us as a novelist, we shall ex-
tract some specimens of his style. Here we
have a view of Julian after his becoming a
priest:—

Julian soon found that in his functions of priest he
should have to teach that which he rejected in childhood
and which as a simple scholar he had been ashamed to,
learn. But once a priest he thought he could more quickly
abandon this dishonest casuistry, and with respect to mo-
rality there was nothing to give up. It was supposed by
many that he took orders for the purpose of having some
share in the wealth of the Church ; under the patronage of
Madame de Luxembourg, he would soon obtain some
rich abbey, the revenues of which he would dissipate, like
so many others, at Paris. The world, therefore, was much
astonished to see him seriously assume his new character,
ask for a country cure, and, notwithstanding all that was
said about it, establish himself there. He wished it to be
in one of the distant provinces, but Madame de Luxem-
bourg insisted that he should not go far off. During six
months, however, he only went two or three times to
Paris.
Having devoted himself entirely to the duties of his voca-
tion, he congratulated himself at first on the success of his
plan. For the first two months he had been left as little
as possible to his own thoughts, having only time and
strength to fulfil the daily routine of his office. He regu-
larly said mass, regularly read his breviary, regularly read
his daily discourse on Sunday; he lived by clockwork, and
happy—as a clock. Nobody in the parish appeared to require
anything further of him. The minister for these poor peo-
ple was the man of the mass, the man of baptisms, burials,
and marriages. He was also, it is true, the man of the
confessional ; but Julian shunned it ; he would not risk
meeting there with distracted' souls who might recal his
own conflicts. Christianity was there what Humanism
always makes it when things follow their natural course,
that is to say, a certain union of observances and ceremo-
nies, a spiritualism in which everything that can devolve
into formalism does so, and about the rest the pastor is
often as ignorant as his flock.
Nothing, therefore, could have served Julian's purposes
better than this poor village. To cultivate this spiritual
field it did not require a greater degree of intelligence and
capacity than the care of the pastor's garden.
But woe to him who is reduced to reckon upon the anni-
hilation of his own being ! A living man cannot of his
own accord become a corpse.
Life soon returned to Julian, and, with life, suffering.
To his old griefs he had joined that of a perpetual lie,
having condemned himself to this in order to drive away the
others.
It pained him to be the minister of such puerile super-
stitions, such gross I.•ractices, for he was not of those who
by the aid of a little poetry found everything beautiful, as
if the beautiful must of necessity be the true, or the ab-
surd could ever be beautiful.
It pained hint to bestow on the penitents that absolution
which he felt hod alone could give, since hod only can
read the heart.
Again, he was grieved at the confidence shown him by
his parishioners, and all the marks of respect which they
paid him, and he spurned to receive the salary (paltry
though it was) which rewarded his labours. Was it not,
he asked himself, the price of hypocrisy and hes ?
Even good works, on which he had so greatly depended
to throw a happy influence over the rest, did not possess
that sweetness which he had anticipated. Good.works had
brought happiness to a sceptic, settled and quiet in his un-
belief, as for instance to Helvetias ; but to a distracted
soul they were mere observances, withered fruits, a body
without a soul. " Faith without works is dead," with the
Scripture ; but Julian felt it intensely that works also are
dead without faith. He sought to give them life, which
must first be in the individual, and Julian had it not.
What was to be done ? To tell the people that their re-
ligion was worth nothing would be a scandal, and still
more a cruelty, unless he had another and a better one to
offer them. He might leave them without an explanation ;
but he would have to explain himself elsewhere, and how
I would the world understand his scruples ?
' He confided them to his bishop, but he, unfortunately,
was the man least calculated to comprehend them.
Julian attends the deathbed of Madame
L de Deffand, and the following scene takes
• place :