Lamennais was for the most part his own teacher. He betook
himself, however, to literature, and in 1807 was appointed to a
mastership in the St. Malo Grammar School. Shortly afterwards he
published a treatise on 'The Church during the Eighteenth Century,' and
taking orders before long followed it up by others. These placed him in
the forefront of the Catholic reaction, of which Chateaubriand from the
picturesque, and Joseph de Maistre from the philosophical side, were the
leaders. He took priest's orders in 1816, and in 1817 published his
_Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion_. This is a sweeping
defence of the absolute authority of the Church, but the 'rift within
the lute' already appears. Lamennais bases this authority, according to
a tradition of that very eighteenth century which he most ardently
opposes, on universal consent. Although therefore the deductive portion
of his argument is in thorough accordance with Roman doctrine, the
inductive portion can hardly be said to be so, and it prepared the way
for his subsequent change of front. For a time Lamennais contented
himself with the hope of establishing a sect of liberal royalist
Catholics. A rapid succession of journals, most of which were
suppressed, led to the _Avenir_, in which Montalembert, Lacordaire, and
others took part, and which, like some English periodicals of a later
period, aimed directly at the union of orthodox religious principles of
the Roman complexion with political liberalism, and a certain freedom of
thought in other directions. The _Avenir_ was definitely censured by
Gregory XVI. in 1832, and Lamennais rapidly fell away from his previous
orthodoxy. He had established himself in the country with a following of
youthful disciples. Of these the best-known now is Maurice de Guerin, a
feeble poet who died young, but who, with his abler sister Eugenie,
interested Sainte-Beuve, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and others. _Les Paroles
d'un Croyant_, which appeared in 1834, united speculative Republicanism
of the most advanced kind with a direct defiance of Rome in matter of
religion, and this was followed by a long series of works in the same
spirit. Lamennais' ardent and ill-balanced temperament, the chief note
of which was the most excessive personal vanity, no sooner threw off the
yoke of orthodoxy than it ran to the opposite extreme, and the Catholic
royalist of the first empire became an atheistic, or at most theistic,
democrat. Lamennais died i