Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Though naturally religious, Louis did not accept the minute practices of the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with Saint Theresa and Fénelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints, who, in our day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. He was rigidly calm during the services. His own prayers went up in gusts, in aspirations, without any regular formality; in all things he gave himself up to nature, and would not pray, any more than he would think, at any fixed hour. In chapel he was equally apt to think of God or to meditate on some problem of philosophy.

To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect type of his system. Et Verbum caro factum est seemed a sublime statement intended to express the traditional formula of the

Will, the Word, and the Act made visible. Christ’s unconsciousness of His Death—having so perfected His inner Being by divine works that one day the invisible form of it appeared to His disciples—and the other Mysteries of the Gospels, the magnetic cures wrought by Christ, and the gift of tongues, all to him confirmed his doctrine. I remember once hearing him say on this subject that the greatest work that could be written nowadays was a History -of the Primitive Church. And he never rose to such poetic heights as when, in the evening, as we conversed, he would enter onan inquiry into miracles worked by the power of Will during that great age of faith. He dis- | 2cerned the strongest evidence of his theory in most of the martyrdoms endured during the first century of our era, which he spoke of as the great era of the Mind.

‘Do not the phenomena observed in almost every instance of the torments so heroically endured by the early Christians for the establishment of the faith amply prove that Material force will never prevail against the force of Ideas or the Will of man?’’ he would say. ‘‘From this effect, produced by the Will of all, each man may draw conclusions in favor of his own.”’

I need say nothing of his views on poetry or history, nor of his judgment on the masterpieces of our language. There would be little interest in the record of opinions now almost universally held, though at that time, from the lips of a boy, they might seem remarkable. Louis was capable of the highest’ flights. To give a notion of his talents in two words, he could have written ‘‘Zadig’’ as wittily as Voltaire; he could have thought out the Dialogue between Sylla and Hucrates as powerfully as Montesquieu. His rectitude of character made him desire above