in the eighteenth century. It leaves wholly unaccounted
for the prodigious host of monstrous or imperfect organisms, and the
appalling law of merciless and incessant destruction.

To us this is the familiar discussion of the day. But let us return to
the starting-point of this chapter. In France a hundred and twenty years
ago it was the first opening of a decisive breach in the walls that had
sheltered the men of Western Europe against outer desolation for some
fifteen centuries or more. The completeness of Catholicism, as a
self-containing system of life and thought, is now harder for
Protestants or Sceptics to realise, than any other fact in the whole
history of human society. Catholicism was not only an institution, nor
only a religious faith; it was also a philosophy and a systematised
theory of the universe. The Church during its best age directed the
moral relations of individual men, and attempted, more or less
successfully, to humanise the relations of communities. It satisfied or
stimulated the affections by its exaltation of the Virgin Mary as a
supreme object of worship; it nourished the imagination on polytheistic
legends of saints and martyrs; it stirred the religious emotions by
touching and impressive rites; it surrounded its members with emblems of
a special and invincible protection. Catholicism, we have again and
again to repeat, claimed to deal with life as a whole, and to leave no
province of nature, no faculty of man, no need of intelligence or
spirit, uncomprehended. But we must not forget that, though this
prodigious system had its root in the affections and sympathies of human
nature, it was also fenced round by a theory of metaphysic. It rested
upon authority and tradition, but it also sought an expression in an
intellectual philosophy of things. The essence of this philosophy was to
make man the final cause of the universe. Its interpretation of the
world was absolute; its conception of the Creator was absolute; its
account of our intellectual impressions, of our moral rules, of our
spiritual ideals, made them all absolute. Now Diderot, when he wrote the
Letter on the Blind, perceived that mere rationalistic attacks upon the
sacred books, upon the miracles, upon the moral types, of Catholicism,
could only be partially effective for destruction, and could have no
effect at all in replacing the old ways of thinking by others of more
solid truth. The attack must begin in philosophy. The first fruit