With such throes as these was the birth of Lamennais' faith in his religious vocation accompanied. He overcame his despair; he, to whom it was a necessity to be whatever he was with his whole soul--even if it was the opposite of what he had been before--became with his whole soul a priest. So absolutely did he feel himself one that his first angry exclamation when Rome left him in the lurch in 1832 was: "I will teach them what it means to defy a priest!" He had a strong character and a narrow mind; a born party man, it was his nature to take a side obstinately and blindly, to defend what he for the moment regarded as absolute truth with passionate love and eloquent hate. Hence as soon as the ruling idea of the period takes hold of him he becomes its doughtiest champion--the most ardent, the most consistent, the most sincere and most undaunted defender of the autocratic principle of authority and the unconditional submission which that principle demands. The man who had suffered such agony of mind in yielding up his own reason and will to the will of the church, the one real priest of the Neo-Catholic school, seems, as it were, to grudge other men better conditions than had been granted to himself. When, in language ominous of storm, he proclaims the gospel of authority and obedience, he, beyond all others, makes us feel how personal passion finds satisfaction in the sweeping, universal demand, how the Ego which has felt itself compelled once for all to submit to authority asserts itself by bending and bowing the wills and thoughts of all other men to that rule with which it now identifies itself.
Violent and obstinately independent, Lamennais certainly recognised no authority within his own camp. His remarks upon the other leaders of the school form a pleasing collection of invectives. Of Bonald, for instance, he writes: "Poor humanity! How M. de Bonald should be suggested to me by the word 'humanity' passes my comprehension. The transition is an abrupt one. They say that the poor man has become quite feeble-minded lately." Of Chateaubriand: "The King and he, he and the King--this is the whole history of France.... No one can understand, he least of all, how Europe is to dispense with his talents. He prophesies that Europe will fare ill." Of Frayssinous, who as leader of the Gallican party in the church was his opponent: "You call him moderate. Why? Because your attention has been drawn to something cold in him, which you take to be moderation, but which is only congealed hatred." Such is the tone of Lamennais' letters. There was, nevertheless, in his vigorous and, if not blindly precipitate, at least blindly impetuous character the very stuff to make a matchless champion of the absolute authority of the church--and this, till the end came, he proved to be--a champion whose capacity of subjecting others to discipline was greater than his capacity of allowing himself to be persuaded against his honest conviction.