dable, as soon as they have
been shorn of the sophistries and illusions with which the pundits
clothe them. The real work of the reformers is to hack away these
encumbering theories. The average European has not followed, and could
not follow, the amazing and never-ending disputation on obscure
theological points round which raged the Reformation; but the one solid
fact which did emerge from the whole was the general realization that
whatever the truth might be in all this confusion, it was quite
evidently wicked and futile to attempt to compel conformity to any one
section of it by force; that in the interests of all force should be
withheld; because if such queries were settled by the accident of
predominant force, it would prove, not which was right, but which was
stronger. So in such things as witchcraft. The learned and astute judges
of the 18th century, who sent so many thousands to their death for
impossible crimes, knew far more of the details of witchcraft than do
we, and would beat us hopelessly in an argument on the subject; but all
their learning was of no avail, because they had a few simple facts, the
premises, crooked, and we have them straight; and all that we need to
know in this amazing tangle of learned nonsense, is that the
probabilities are against an old woman having caused a storm at sea and
drowned a Scottish King. And so with the French Revolution. What the
Encyclopaedists and other pioneers of that movement really did for the
European peoples in that matter, was not to elaborate fantastic schemes
of constitution making, but by their argumentation to achieve the
destruction of old political sophistries--Divine Rights of Kings and
what not--and to enable one or two simple facts to emerge clearly and
unmistakeably, as that the object of government is the good of the
governed, and can find its justification in nothing else whatsoever. It
was these simple truths which, spreading over the world--with many
checks and set-backs--have so profoundly modified the structure of
Christendom.

Somewhere it is related of Montaigne that talking with academic
colleagues, he expressed a contemptuous disbelief in the whole elaborate
theory of witchcraft as it existed at that time. Scandalised, his
colleagues took him into the University library, and showed him
hundreds, thousands, of parchment volumes written in Latin by the
learned men of the subject. Had he read these volumes, that he talked so
disrespectfully