From the INTRODUCTION.
IF the eighteenth century in France is known to us as the century of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, as an age of doubt and intellectual seeking and ultimate enfranchisement, culminating, in its closing years, in the most deliberate and thorough effort made in modern times to blot out revealed religion from the life of a nation, the nineteenth century in France will surely come to be known as a period of ceaseless religious controversy with able combatants on either side, between whom victory has held the balance with a fairly impartial hand. True, the Catholic Church has regained to an amazing extent much of what she had previously lost, but equally true that the opponents of religious dogma have held fast with successful determination to that liberty of thought which they have honestly believed to be in peril. Such a state of things might not have been, in the main, unfavourable to the moral and spiritual growth of the French nation, were it not that the controversy has been carried forward on either side with a bitterness of spirit and a narrowness of aim that no circumstances can justify, and which have eaten so deeply into the life of the nation, that it is a question whether the wounds inflicted can ever be wholly healed.
One of the nineteenth-century combatants on the Catholic side was Ernest Hello, a thinker of such keenness of vision, a writer of such purity of diction that, at his best, he may be read with delight even by those who do not share his intellectual and religious convictions. Little known outside of France, intimately known even in his own country only to a small band of writers and thinkers associated with him, his influence has been none the less a real and an abiding one, and a source of inspiration to not a few of the younger men of his day. Huysmans has borrowed much, Maeterlinck has learnt much from him. Hellos greatness lies in his single-mindedness, his searching, penetrative logic, the fineness of his spiritual perceptions. His weakness lies in his incapacity-most characteristically French- for seeing any point of view save his own, for crediting his adversaries with any honesty of purpose, for extending to their failings any Christian charity. As a personality he is original almost to eccentricity; a lifelong sufferer from ill-health, yet a ceaseless worker, an eager participator in the intellectual life of his day, a brilliant talker. That the writings of a man in many ways so unique should have scarcely penetrated across the Channel is surely a matter for regret, and a real loss to ourselves....