the innumerable
corruptions which, in the time of Leo X. and Luther, brought about the
Reformation--Sismondi, with his natural detestation of a faith which
had urged on the dreadful cruelties of the crusade of the Albigenses,
and which produced the revocation of the edict of Nantes--have alike
overlooked these important truths, so essential to a right
understanding of the history of modern society. They saw that the
arrogance and cruelty of the Roman clergy had produced innumerable
evils in later times; that their venality in regard to indulgences and
abuse of absolution had brought religion itself into discredit; that
the absurd and incredible tenets which they still attempted to force
on mankind, had gone far to alienate the intellectual strength of
modern Europe, during the last century, from their support. Seeing
this, they condemned it absolutely, for all times and in all places.
They fell into the usual error of men in reasoning on former from
their own times. They could not make "the past and the future
predominate over the present." They felt the absurdity of many of the
legends which the devout Catholics received as undoubted truths, and
they saw no use in perpetuating the belief in them; and thence they
conceived that they must always have been equally unserviceable,
forgetting that the eighteenth was not the eighth century; and that,
during the dark ages, violence would have rioted without control, if,
when reason was in abeyance, knowledge scanty, and military strength
alone in estimation, superstition had not thrown its unseen fetters
over the barbarian's arms. They saw that the Romish clergy, during
five centuries, had laboured strenuously, and often with the most
frightful cruelty, to crush independence of thought in matters of
faith, and chain the human mind to the tenets, often absurd and
erroneous, of her Papal creed; and they forgot that, during five
preceding centuries, the Christian church had laboured as assiduously
to establish the independence of thought from physical coercion, and
had alone kept alive, during the interregnum of reason, the sparks of
knowledge and the principles of freedom.

In the same liberal and enlightened spirit Guizot views the feudal
system, the next grand characteristic of modern times.

"A decisive proof that, in the tenth century, the feudal system
had become necessary, and was, in truth, the only social state
possible, is to be found in the universalit