ook lies in the
immense significance of the movement of political ideas and forces to
which they belong. The true interest of all history lies in the
spectacle which it furnishes of the growth and dissolution, the shock
and the transformation, incessantly at work among the great groups of
human conceptions. The decree against the Encyclopaedia marks the central
moment of a collision between two antagonistic conceptions which
disputed, and in France still dispute, with one another the shaping and
control of institutions. One of these ideas is the exclusion of
political authority from the sphere and function of directing opinion;
it implies the absolute secularisation of government. The rival idea
prompted the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the dragonnades, the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and all the other acts of the same
policy, which not only deprived France of thousands of the most
conscientious and most ingenious of her sons, but warped and corrupted
the integrity of the national conscience. It is natural that we should
feel anger at the arbitrary attempt to arrest Diderot's courageous and
enlightened undertaking. Yet in truth it was only the customary
inference from an accepted principle, that it is the business or the
right of governments to guide thought and regulate its expression. The
Jesuits acted on this theory, and resorted to repressive power and the
secular arm whenever they could. The Jansenists repudiated the
principle, but eagerly practised it whenever the turn of intrigue gave
them the chance.

An extraordinary and unforeseen circumstance changed the external
bearings of this critical conflict of ideas. The conception of the
duties of the temporal authority in the spiritual sphere had been
associated hitherto with Catholic doctrine. The decay of that doctrine
was rapidly discrediting the conception allied with it. But the movement
was interrupted. And it was interrupted by a man who suddenly stepped
out from the ranks of the Encyclopaedists themselves. Rousseau from his
solitary cottage at Montmorency (1758) fulminated the celebrated letter
to D'Alembert on Stage Plays. The article on Geneva in the seventh
volume of the Encyclopaedia had not only praised the pastors for their
unbelief; it also assailed the time-honoured doctrine of the churches
that the theatre is an institution from hell and an invention of devils.
D'Alembert paid a compliment to his patriarch and master at Ferney, as
well as sho