what these tendencies are now, or are likely to be. The nineteenth
century has hitherto leaned to the historical and relative aspect of the
great controversy. The eighteenth was characteristically dogmatic, and
the destroyers of the faith were not any less dogmatic in their own way,
than those who professed to be its apologists.

* * * * *

Probably it was not long after the composition of this apologetic
thesis, before Turgot became alive to the precise position of a creed
which had come to demand apologetic theses. This was, indeed, one of the
marked and critical moments in the great transformation of religious
feeling and ecclesiastical order in Europe, of which our own age, four
generations later, is watching a very decisive, if not a final stage.
Turgot's demonstration of the beneficence of Christianity was delivered
in July 1750--almost the exact middle of the eighteenth century. The
death of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, ten years before, had given the
signal for the break-up of the European system. The iron army of Prussia
made its first stride out of the narrow northern borders, into the broad
arena of the West, and every new illustration of the fortitude and depth
and far-reaching power of Prussia has been a new blow to the old
Catholic organisation. The first act of this prodigious drama closed
while Turgot was a pupil at the Sorbonne. The court of France had
blundered into alliances against the retrograde and Catholic house of
Austria, while England, with equal blindness, had stumbled into
friendship with it. Before the opening of the second act or true
climax--that is, before the Seven Years' War began--interests and forces
became more naturally adjusted. France, Spain, and Austria, Bourbons and
Hapsburgs, the great pillars of the Church, were ranged against England
and Prussia, the half-conscious representatives of those industrial and
individualist principles which replaced, whether for a time or
permanently, the decaying system of aristocratic caste in temporal
things, and an ungrowing Catholicism in things spiritual. In 1750
ecclesiastical far-sightedness, court intrigue, and family ambitions,
were actively preparing the way for the Austrian alliance in the
mephitic air of Versailles. The issue at stake was the maintenance of
the supremacy of the Church, and the ancient Christian organisation of
France and of Europe.

We now know how this long battle has gone. The Jesuit Chur