vigorous civilisation, because they had
organised Europe of old, was as infatuated as it would have been to
expect the later emperors to equal the exploits of the Republic and
their greatest predecessors in the purple. To despise philosophers and
men of science was only to play over again in a new dress the very part
which Julian had enacted in the face of nascent Christianity. The
eighteenth century, instead of being that home of malaria which the
Catholic and Royalist party represented, was in truth the seed-ground of
a new and better future. Its ideas were to furnish the material and the
implements by which should be repaired the terrible breaches and chasms
in European order that had been made alike by despots and Jacobins, by
priests and atheists, by aristocrats and sans-culottes. Amidst all the
demolition upon which its leading minds had been so zealously bent, they
had been animated by the warmest love of social justice, of human
freedom, of equal rights, and by the most fervent and sincere longing to
make a nobler happiness more universally attainable by all the children
of men. It was to these great principles that we ought eagerly to turn,
to liberty, to equality, to brotherhood, if we wished to achieve before
the new invaders a work of civilisation and social reconstruction, such
as Catholicism and feudalism had achieved for the multitudinous invaders
of old.

Such was the difference which divided opinion when men took heart to
survey the appalling scene of moral desolation that the cataclysm of '93
had left behind. We may admire the courage of either school. For if the
conscience of the Liberals was oppressed by the sanguinary tragedy in
which freedom and brotherhood and justice had been consummated, the
Catholic and the Royalist were just as sorely burdened with the weight
of kingly basenesses and priestly hypocrisies. If the one had some
difficulty in interpreting Jacobinism and the Terror, the other was
still more severely pressed to interpret the fact and origin and meaning
of the Revolution; if the Liberal had Marat and Hebert, the Royalist had
Lewis XV., and the Catholic had Dubois and De Rohan. Each school could
intrepidly hurl back the taunts of its enemy, and neither of them did
full justice to the strong side of the other. Yet we who are, in England
at all events, removed a little aside from the centre of this great
battle, may perceive that at that time both of the contending hosts
fought under ho