Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) | Page 3

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 penetrate into the history of opinion, the
more strongly are we tempted to believe that in the great matters of
speculation no question is altogether new, and hardly any answer is
altogether new. But the Church had known how to deal with

intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the twelfth century down to
Giordano Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were isolated;
they were for the most part submissive; and if they were not, the arm of
the Church was very long and her grasp mortal. And all these
meritorious precursors were made weak by one cardinal defect, for
which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could compensate. They had the
scientific idea, but they lacked the social idea. They could have set
opinion right about the efficacy of the syllogism, and the virtue of
entities and quiddities. They could have taught Europe earlier than the
Church allowed it to learn that the sun does not go round the earth, and
that it is the earth which goes round the sun. But they were wholly
unfitted to deal with the prodigious difficulties of moral and social
direction. This function, so immeasurably more important than the
mere discovery of any number of physical relations, it was the glory of
the Church to have discharged for some centuries with as much success
as the conditions permitted. We are told indeed by writers ignorant
alike of human history and human nature, that only physical science
can improve the social condition of man. The common sense of the
world always rejects this gross fallacy. The acquiescence for so many
centuries in the power of the great directing organisation of Western
Europe, notwithstanding its intellectual inadequateness, was the
decisive expression of that rejection.
After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the
pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was
marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most
significant feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the
scientific idea and by the social idea. It was an advance both in
knowledge and in moral motive. It rested on a conception which was
crude and imperfect enough, but which was still almost, like the great
ecclesiastical conception itself, a conception of life as a whole.
Morality, positive law, social order, economics, the nature and limits of
human knowledge, the constitution of the physical universe, had one by
one disengaged themselves from theological explanations. The final
philosophical movement of the century in France, which was
represented by Diderot, now tended to a new social synthesis resting on
a purely positive basis. If this movement had only added to its other

contents the historic