Thus essentially Protestant in the good (hence not the sectarian) sense of the word is the religious revival in Germany in its beginnings. It asserts _personal_ originality to be the one essential factor in religion, and defines as the province of religion the whole widespread realm of our warm, true feelings. Natural, healthy feeling is always holy, at no time peculiarly holy.
A marked and significant contrast to all this is provided by the principles set forth in Lamennais' great work, which forms the Latin and Catholic counterpart to Schleiermacher's Lectures. These principles, the programme of pure externality, are as follows:
1. That _feeling_ or indirect revelation is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.
2. That _scientific research_ or _reasoning_ is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.
3. That _authority_ is the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion; and that consequently the true religion is unquestionably the religion which rests upon the strongest possible visible (!) authority.
It is to prove these three remarkable and droll assertions that Lamennais has written his four thick volumes. Let us make ourselves acquainted with their very imperfect chain of reasoning.
It is of paramount importance to us human beings to discover an infallible criterion of what is true and what is false. What we seek is _certainty_. But where are we to find it?
We cannot derive it from our senses, for our senses deceive us, says Lamennais. That the senses conjointly correct such false impressions as each sense separately produces, is a fact of which he does not take cognisance. We are, in his opinion, the less certain of any necessary connection between the impressions of our senses and the reality of things, from our not even being certain of our own existence. How we, if we are not certain of that, can be certain of anything whatsoever, is a question he leaves unanswered.
Conviction, the inward feeling that the thing must be so, is, he affirms, as deceptive as are the impressions of the senses. The irresistible force with which a principle imposes itself upon our reason affords no proof of the truth of that principle. Error is always possible. That one may quite well acknowledge one's fallibility generally speaking, and yet regard one's self as certain of the truth in many single, definite cases, is another fact he leaves out of reckoning.