had now sunk to a
small minority of the French clergy. The great ecclesiastical body at
length offered an unbroken front to its rivals, the great judicial
bodies. A patriotic minister was indeed audacious enough to propose a
tax upon ecclesiastical property, but the Church fought the battle and
won. Troops had just been despatched to hunt and scatter the Protestants
of the desert, and bigots exulted in the thought of pastors swinging on
gibbets, and heretical congregations fleeing for their lives before the
fire of orthodox musketry. The house of Austria had been forced to
suffer spoliation at the hands of the infidel Frederick, but all the
world was well aware that the haughty and devout Empress-Queen would
seize a speedy opportunity of taking a crushing vengeance; France would
this time be on the side of righteousness and truth. For the moment a
churchman might be pardoned if he thought that superstition, ignorance,
abusive privilege, and cruelty were on the eve of the smoothest and most
triumphant days that they had known since the Reformation.

We now know how illusory this sanguine anticipation was destined to
prove, and how promptly. In little more than forty years after the
triumphant enforcement of the odious system of confessional
certificates, then the crowning event of ecclesiastical supremacy, Paris
saw the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the adoration of the Goddess of
Reason. The Church had scarcely begun to dream before she was rudely and
peremptorily awakened. She found herself confronted by the most
energetic, hardy, and successful assailants whom the spirit of progress
ever inspired. Compared with the new attack, Jansenism was no more than
a trifling episode in a family quarrel. Thomists and Molinists became as
good as confederates, and Quietism barely seemed a heresy. In every age,
even in the very depth of the times of faith, there had arisen
disturbers of the intellectual peace. Almost each century after the
resettlement of Europe by Charlemagne had procured some individual, or
some little group, who had ventured to question this or that article of
the ecclesiastical creed, to whom broken glimpses of new truth had come,
and who had borne witness against the error or inconsistency or
inadequateness of old ways of thinking. The questions which presented
themselves to the acuter minds of a hundred years ago, were present to
the acuter minds who lived hundreds of years before that. The more
deeply we pe