chmen lost
their lead, and were thrown back out of the civil and political sphere.
We know, too, what effect these blows to the Catholic organisation have
had upon the activity of the Catholic idea. With the decline and
extermination of the predominance of Churchmen in civil affairs, there
began a tendency, which has since become deeper and stronger, in the
Church to withdraw herself and her sons from a sphere where she could no
longer be sovereign and queen. Religion, since the Revolution, isolates
the most devout Catholics from political action and political interests.
This great change, however, this return of the leaders of the Christian
society upon the original conceptions of the Christian faith, did not
come to pass in Turgot's time. He watched the struggle of the Church for
the maintenance of its temporal privilege and honour, and for the
continued protection by secular power of its spiritual supremacy. The
outcome of the struggle was later.

We may say, in fine, that if this first public composition of Turgot's
is extremely imperfect, it was better to exaggerate the services of
Christianity, alike as an internal faith and as a peculiar form of
social organisation, than to describe Gregory the Great and Innocent,
Hildebrand and Bernard, as artful and vulgar tyrants, and Aquinas and
Roger Bacon as the products of a purely barbarous, stationary, and dark
age. There is at first sight something surprising in the respect which
Turgot's ablest contemporaries paid to the contributions made to
progress by Greece and Rome, compared with their angry disparagement of
the dark ages. The reason of this contrast we soon discover to be that
the passions of present contests gave their own colour to men's
interpretation of the circumstances of the remote middle time, between
the Roman Empire and the commencement of the revolutionary period.
Turgot escaped these passions more completely than any man of his time
who was noble enough to be endowed with the capacity for passion. He
never forgot that it is as wise and just to confess the obligations of
mankind to the Catholic monotheism of the West, as it is shallow and
unjust in professors of Christianity to despise or hate the lower
theological systems which guide the humbler families of mankind.

Let us observe that only three years after this academic discourse in
praise of the religion of the time, Turgot was declaring that 'the
greatest of the services of Christianity to the w