ed progress.

II.

In 1750 Turgot, then only in his twenty-fourth year, was appointed to
the honorary office of Prior of the Sorbonne, an elective distinction
conferred annually, as it appears, on some meritorious or highly
connected student. It was held in the following year by Lomenie de
Brienne. In this capacity Turgot read two Latin dissertations, one at
the opening of the session, and the other at its close. The first of
these was upon 'The Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity
has conferred upon the Human Race.'

* * * * *

Its value, as might well have been expected from the circumstances of
its production, is not very high. It is pitched in a tone of exaltation
that is eminently unfavourable to the permanently profitable treatment
of such a subject. There are in it too many of those eloquent and
familiar commonplaces of orthodox history, by which the doubter tries to
warm himself into belief, and the believer dreams that he is
corroborating faith by reason. The assembly for whom his discourse was
prepared, could hardly have endured the apparition in the midst of them
of what both rigorous justice and accurate history required to have
taken into account on the other side. It was not to be expected that a
young student within the precincts of the Sorbonne should have any eyes
for the evil with which the forms of the Christian religion, like other
growths of the human mind, from the lowest forms of savage animism
upwards, have ever alloyed its good. The absence of all reference to one
half of what the annals of the various Christian churches have to teach
us, robs the first of Turgot's discourses of that serious and durable
quality which belongs to all his other writings.

It is fair to point out that the same vicious exclusiveness was
practised by the enemies of the Church, and that if history was to one
of the two contending factions an exaggerated enumeration of the
blessings of Christianity, it was to their passionate rivals only a
monotonous catalogue of curses. Of this temper we have a curious
illustration in the circumstance that Dupont, Turgot's intimate friend
of later years, who collected and published his works, actually took the
trouble to suppress the opening of this very Discourse, in which Turgot
had replied to the reproach often made against Christianity, of being
useful only for a future life.[32]

[Footnote 32: _OEuv._ ii. 586, _n._]

In the firs