He was, indeed, very conservative, and even more wary
and diplomatic; seeming, like Voltaire, to feel that "among
wolves one must howl a little." It was a time of reaction.
Napoleon had made peace with the Church, and to disturb that
peace was akin to treason. By large but vague concessions Cuvier
kept the theologians satisfied, while he undermined their
strongest fortress. The danger was instinctively felt by some of
the champions of the Church, and typical among these was
Chateaubriand, who in his best-known work, once so great, now so
little--the _Genius of Christianity_--grappled with the questions
of creation by insisting upon a sort of general deception "in
the beginning," under which everything was created by a sudden
fiat, but with appearances of pre-existence. His words are as
follows: "It was part of the perfection and harmony of the
nature which was displayed before men's eyes that the deserted
nests of last year's birds should be seen on the trees, and that
the seashore should be covered with shells which had been the
abode of fish, and yet the world was quite new, and nests and
shells had never been inhabited.
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