l laws. By means of this internal change, it has everywhere
had the effect of weakening despotism, so that the limits of
Christianity seem to mark also the limits of mild government and public
felicity. Kings saw the supreme tribunal of a God who should judge them
and the cause of their people. Thus the distance between them and their
subjects became as nothing in the infinite distance between kings and
subjects alike, and the divinity that was equally elevated above either.
They were both in some sort equalised by a common abasement. 'Ye
nations, be subject to authority,' cried the voice of religion to the
one; and to the other it cried, 'Ye kings, who judge the earth, learn
that God has only entrusted you with the image of power for the
happiness of your peoples.'

An eloquent description of the efficacy of Christianity in raising human
nature, and impressing on kings the obligation of pursuing above all
things the wellbeing of their subjects, closes with a courtly official
salutation of the virtues of that Very Christian King, Lewis the
Fifteenth.

* * * * *

'It is ill reasoning against religion,' an illustrious contemporary of
Turgot's had said, in a deprecatory sentence that serves to mark the
spirit of the time; 'to compile a long list of the evils which it has
inflicted, without doing the same for the blessings which it has
bestowed.'[35] Conversely we may well think it unphilosophical and
unconvincing to enumerate all the blessings without any of the evils; to
tell us how the Christian doctrine enlarged the human spirit, without
observing what narrowing limitations it imposed; to dwell on all the
mitigating influences with which the Christian churches have been
associated, while forgetting all the ferocities which they have
inspired. The history of European belief offers a double record since
the decay of polytheism, and if for a certain number of centuries this
record shows the civilisation of men's instincts by Christianity, it
reveals to us in the centuries subsequent, the reverse process of the
civilisation of Christianity by men's instincts. Turgot's piece treats
half the subject as if it were the whole. He extends down to the middle
of the eighteenth century a number of propositions and implied
inferences, which are only true up to the beginning of the fourteenth.

[Footnote 35: _Esprit des Lois_, bk. xxiv. ch. ii.]

Even within this limitation there are many questions that no