awakened the
greatest transports of indignation among the ardent multitudes who, at
its close, brought about the French Revolution. Very different is the
light in which the eye of true philosophy, enlightened by the
experience of their abolition, views these great distinctive features
of modern society.

"Immense," says Guizot, "was the influence which the Christian
church exercised over the civilization of modern Europe. In the
outset, it was an incalculable advantage to have a moral power, a
power destitute of physical force, which reposed only on mental
convictions and moral feelings, established amidst that deluge of
physical force and selfish violence which overwhelmed society at
that period. Had the Christian church not existed, the world
would have been delivered over to the influence of physical
strength, in its coarsest and most revolting form. It alone
exercised a moral power. It did more; it spread abroad the idea
of a rule of obedience, a heavenly power, to which all human
beings, how great soever, were subjected, and which was above all
human laws. That of itself was a safeguard against the greatest
evils of society; for it affected the minds of those by whom they
were brought about; it professed that belief--the foundation of
the salvation of humanity--that there is above all existing
institutions, superior to all human laws, a permanent and divine
law, sometimes called Reason, sometimes Divine Command, but
which, under whatever name it goes, is for ever the same.

"Then the church commenced a great work--the separation of the
spiritual and temporal power. That separation is the origin of
liberty of conscience; it rests on no other principle than that
which lies at the bottom of the widest and most extended
toleration. The separation of the spiritual and temporal power
rests on the principle, that physical force is neither entitled
to act, nor can ever have any lasting influence, on thoughts,
conviction, truth; it flows from the eternal distinction between
the world of thought and the world of action, the world of
interior conviction and that of external facts. In truth, that
principle of the liberty of conscience, for which Europe has
combated and suffered so much, which has so slowly triumphed, and
often against the utmost efforts of the clergy