n's statements on this subject in Ashley's _Life
of Palmerston_, ii. 200-211. Tocqueville, however, utterly denies that
the majority of the Assembly had any sympathy with these views
(Tocqueville's _Memoirs_ (Eng. trans.), ii. 177). Maupas, in his
_Memoires_, gives a very detailed account of the conspiracy on the
Bonapartist side. It appears that the 'homme de confiance' of
Changarnier was in his pay.

[52] Tocqueville's _Memoirs_, ii.

[53] Ashley's _Life of Palmerston_, ii. 208.

[54] Newman.

[55] See Ollivier, _L'Empire Liberal_, i. 510-512.

[56] _Second Report of the Select Committee on British South Africa_
(July, 1897).

[57] _Parliamentary Debates_, July 26, 1897, 1169, 1170.

CHAPTER XI

The necessities for moral compromise I have traced in the army, in the
law, and in the fields of politics may be found in another form not less
conspicuously in the Church. The members, and still more the ministers,
of an ancient Church bound to formularies and creeds that were drawn up
in long bygone centuries, are continually met by the difficulties of
reconciling these forms with the changed conditions of human knowledge,
and there are periods when the pressure of these difficulties is felt
with more than common force. Such, for example, were the periods of the
Renaissance and the Reformation, when changes in the intellectual
condition of Europe produced a widespread conviction of the vast amount
of imposture and delusion which had received the sanction of a Church
that claimed to be infallible, the result being in some countries a
silent evanescence of all religious belief among the educated class,
even including a large number of the leaders of the Church, and in other
countries a great outburst of religious zeal aiming at the restoration
of Christianity to its primitive form and a repudiation of the
accretions of superstition that had gathered around it. The Copernican
theory proving that our world is not, as was long believed, the centre
of the universe, but a single planet moving with many others around a
central sun, and the discovery, by the instrumentality of the
telescope, of the infinitesimally small place which our globe occupies
in the universe, altered men's measure of probability and affected
widely, though indirectly, their theological beliefs.

A similar change was gradually produced by the Newtonian discovery that
the whole system of the universe was pervaded by one great law, and by
the