e temps."
The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of civilisation, yet it
did not in its early stages aim at any improvement of social conditions;
it did not attack the great injustices which were wrought in the world.
It meant a great crisis because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of
individuals; social effects came afterwards.

The civilisation of modern Europe has grown through a period of fifteen
centuries and is still progressing. The rate of progress has been slower
than that of Greek civilisation, but on the other hand it has been
continuous, uninterrupted, and we can see "the vista of an immense
career."

The effects of Guizot's doctrine in propagating the idea of Progress
were all the greater for its divorce from philosophical theory. He did
not touch perplexing questions like fatality, or discuss the general
plan of the world; he did not attempt to rise above common-sense; and he
did not essay any premature scheme of the universal history of man. His
masterly survey of the social history of Europe exhibited progressive
movement as a fact, in a period in which to the thinkers of the
eighteenth century it had been almost invisible. This of course was far
from proving that Progress is the key to the history of the world and
human destinies. The equation of civilisation with progress remains an
assumption. For the question at once arises: Can civilisation reach a
state of equilibrium from which no further advance is possible; and
if it can, does it cease to be civilisation? Is Chinese civilisation
mis-called, or has there been here too a progressive movement all the
time, however slow? Such questions were not raised by Guizot. But his
view of history was effective in helping to establish the association
of the two ideas of civilisation and progress, which to-day is taken for
granted as evidently true.

7.

The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot
show that--quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of
the "positivists," Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to
speak--there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration
period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement.
Perhaps there is no better illustration of the infectiousness of this
conception than in the Historical Studies which Chateaubriand gave
to the world in 1831. He had learned much, from books as well as from
politics, since he wrote the GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. He had ga