m, but to that fertilising medley of new notions
about human knowledge and human society which then went by the name of
philosophy. What is striking is that the ideas sown by philosophy became
eventually the source of higher life in Catholicism. If the church of
the revolution showed something that we may justly admire, it was
because the encyclopaedic band had involuntarily and inevitably imparted
a measure of their own clearsightedness, fortitude, moral energy, and
spirit of social improvement, to a church which was, when they began
their work, an abominable burden on the spiritual life of the nation. If
the Catholicism of Chateaubriand, of Lamennais, of Montalembert, was a
different thing from the Catholicism of a Dubois, or a Rohan, from the
vile corruptions of the Jesuits and the grovelling superstitions of the
later Jansenists, it was the execrated freethinkers whom the church and
mankind had to thank for the change. The most enlightened Catholic of
to-day ought to admit that Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, were the true
reformers of his creed. They supplied it with ideas which saved it from
becoming finally a curse to civilisation. It was no Christian prelate,
but Diderot who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the
magnificent cry, _Detruisez ces enceintes qui retrecissent vos idees!
Elargissez Dieu!_[103] We see the same phenomenon in our own day. The
Christian churches are assimilating as rapidly as their formula will
permit, the new light and the more generous moral ideas and the higher
spirituality of teachers who have abandoned all churches, and who are
systematically denounced as enemies of the souls of men. _Sic vos non
vobis mellificatis apes!_ These transformations of religion by leavening
elements contributed from a foreign doctrine, are the most interesting
process in the history of truth.

The Encyclopaedia became a powerful engine for aiding such a
transformation. Because it was this, and because it rallied all that was
then best in France round the standard of light and social hope, we
ought hardly to grudge time or pains to its history. For it was not
merely in the field of religious ideas that the Encyclopaedists led
France in a new way. They affected the national life on every side,
pressing forward with enlightened principles in all the branches of
material and political organisation. Their union in a great
philosophical band gave an impressive significance to their work. The
collection within