It is well that he died when he did: it were too painful to picture him still living in these days of betrayal of the victory for which he gave his life so joyously. He deserved to die in battle for France and Christendom, for his death was thus of a piece with his life. As he died, so had he lived—in action; fighting, as he expresses it, on the frontiers of every province of human activity.

During life, the instrument of his action had been the pen. Yet, in a sense, he was a writer only accidentally. Essentially, he was the citizen, and later the patriot and the Christian, who recognizes a duty and claims the right to influence his contemporaries. The authority he wielded was moral rather than intellectual, less doctrinal than educational: heart predominates over head, but since it was a good heart, which had been set true from the beginning, it was able to pilot him, gropingly but safely, through those early years of his public life when his range of action was foreshortened by an overclouding of his intellectual horizon. The return from agnosticism to the Faith, and from utopian socialism to France and Christendom, is scarcely perceptible in his writings: at least, in the earlier Péguy, the later is always clearly discernible. His ‘conversion’ was rather a rediscovery of the supernatural, conditioned perhaps by the realization that true love of neighbour exists, and is possible, only as a function of love of God.