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 296 Since his return from Rome he has written to his diocese that the conflicts of the Church are not like those of the world.

These assertions of Dupanloup as to his unvarying faith may possibly explain why a distinguished fellow-countryman and head of the French Government could describe him in such terms as these: "everything about him indicates the irresistible dominion of impressions. So convinced is he of being in the right that he fails to be accurate to his demonstrations. He is a most imperious advocate of liberty, and always under the influence of preconceptions."

3. Gratry may be taken next: Gratry—whose famous four letters had focussed in brilliant light the difficulties, the contradictions, the adverse facts, the ignorant methods, the falsified documents. Men wondered what steps the former priest of the Oratory would now take; now that the thing that he feared had come to pass, and the incredible was decreed. Gratry had endured much mental agony. "His own peace would certainly have been better insured," says his biographer, "had he not been interrupted in that later contemplative study of Christian philosophy by which he hoped to do somewhat to make his fellowmen less unhappy, less unfit. But he was urged as a matter of conscience to enter the turmoil of polemical strife, a strife more cruel to one who retained his childlike simplicity, his love of truth, and his boundless charity, to the last hour of life."

Gratry was very ill of the malady which killed him; and it was not until November 1871, that he wrote (evidently questioned by Guibert, the new Archbishop of Paris):