student of
Turgot's capacity would now overlook, yet of which he and the most
reasonable spirits of his age took no cognisance. The men of neither
side in the eighteenth century knew what the history of opinion meant.
All alike concerned themselves with its truth or falsehood, with what
they counted to be its abstract fitness or unfitness. A perfect method
places a man where he can command one point of view as well as the
other, and can discern not only how far an idea is true and convenient,
but also how, whether true and convenient or otherwise, it came into its
place in men's minds. We ought to be able to separate in thought the
question of the grounds and evidence for a given dogma being true, from
the distinct and purely historic question of the social and intellectual
conditions which made men accept it for true.

Where, however, there was any question of the two religions whose
document and standards are professedly drawn from the Bible, there the
Frenchmen of that time assumed not a historic attitude, but one
exclusively dogmatic. Everybody was so anxious to prove, that he had
neither freedom nor humour to observe. The controversy as to the exact
measure of the supernatural force in Judaism and its Christian
development was so overwhelmingly absorbing, as to leave without light
or explanation the wide and independent region of their place as simply
natural forces. It may be said, and perhaps it is true, that people
never allow the latter side of the inquiry to become prominent in their
minds until they have settled the former, and settled it in one way:
they must be indifferent to the details of the natural operations of a
religion, until they are convinced that there are none of any other
kind. Be this as it may, we have to record the facts. And it is
difficult to imagine a Frenchman of the era of the Encyclopaedia asking
himself the sort of questions which now present themselves to the
student in such abundance. For instance, has one effect of Christianity
been to exalt a regard for the Sympathetic over the AEsthetic side of
action and character? And if so, to what elements in the forms of
Christian teaching and practice is this due? And is such a transfer of
the highest place from the beauty to the lovableness of conduct to be
accounted a gain, when contrasted with the relative position of the two
sides among the Greeks and Romans?

Again, we have to draw a distinction between the Christian idea and the
out