ht the Gospels and Epistles, and Augustine and Jerome and
Chrysostom, very poor stuff, compared with the--

Mellifluous streams that watered all the schools
Of Academics old and new, with those
Surnamed Peripatetics, and the Sect
Epicurean, and the Stoic severe.

And in some ways, from a literary or logical point of view, the
early Christian writers could ill bear this comparison. But great
bodies of men, in ages of trouble and confusion, have an instinctive
feeling for the fragment of truth which they happen to need at the
hour. They have a spontaneous apprehension of the formula which is
at once the expression of their miseries and the mirror of their
hope. The guiding force in the great changes of the world has not
been the formal logic of the schools or of literature, but the
practical logic of social convenience. Men take as much of a
teacher's doctrine as meets their real wants: the rest they leave.
The Jacobins accepted Rousseau's ideas about the sovereignty of the
people, but they seasonably forgot his glorification of the state of
nature and his denunciations of civilisation and progress. The
American revolutionists cheerfully borrowed the doctrine that all
men are born free and equal, but they kept their slaves.

It was for no lack of competition that the ideas of the Social
Contract, of Raynal's History of the two Indies, of the System of
Nature, of the Philosophical Dictionary, made such astounding and
triumphant way in men's minds. There was Montesquieu with a sort of
historic method. There was Turgot, and the school of the economists.
There were seventy thousand of the secular clergy, and sixty
thousand of the regular clergy, ever proclaiming by life or
exhortation ideas of peace, submission, and a kingdom not of this
world. Why did men turn their backs on these and all else, and
betake themselves to revolutionary ideas? How came those ideas to
rise up and fill the whole air? The answer is that, with all their
contradiction, shallowness, and danger, such ideas fitted the
crisis. They were seized by virtue of an instinct of national
self-preservation. The evil elements in them worked themselves out
in infinite mischief. The true elements in them saved France, by
firing men with social hope and patriotic faith.

How was it, M. Taine rightly asks, that the philosophy of the
eighteenth century, which was born in England and thence sent its
shoots to France, dried u