previously, and than it still was among other nations. Consequently, the
peculiar causes of this phenomenon" (the hatred which it aroused) "must
be looked for less in the condition of religion than in that of society."

"We no longer," he says, shortly after, "ask in what the Church of that
day erred as a religious institution, but how far it stood opposed to the
political revolution which was at hand." And he goes on to show how the
principles of her ecclesiastical government, and her political position,
were such that the _philosophes_ must needs have been her enemies. But
he mentions another fact which seems to me to belong neither to the
category of religion nor to that of politics; a fact which, if he had
done us the honour to enlarge upon it, might have led him and his readers
to a more true understanding of the disrepute into which Christianity had
fallen in France.

"The ecclesiastical authority had been specially employed in keeping
watch over the progress of thought; and the censorship of books was a
daily annoyance to the _philosophes_. By defending the common liberties
of the human mind against the Church, they were combating in their own
cause: and they began by breaking the shackles which pressed most closely
on themselves."

Just so. And they are not to be blamed if they pressed first and most
earnestly reforms which they knew by painful experience to be necessary.
All reformers are wont thus to begin at home. It is to their honour if,
not content with shaking off their own fetters, they begin to see that
others are fettered likewise; and, reasoning from the particular to the
universal, to learn that their own cause is the cause of mankind.

There is, therefore, no reason to doubt that these men were honest, when
they said that they were combating, not in their own cause merely, but in
that of humanity; and that the Church was combating in her own cause, and
that of her power and privilege. The Church replied that she, too, was
combating for humanity; for its moral and eternal well-being. But that
is just what the _philosophes_ denied. They said (and it is but fair to
take a statement which appears on the face of all their writings; which
is the one key-note on which they ring perpetual changes), that the cause
of the Church in France was not that of humanity, but of inhumanity; not
that of nature, but of unnature; not even that of grace, but of disgrace.
Truely or falsely, they complained that