coincided almost exactly with the middle of the century. Voltaire was in
exile at Berlin. The author of the Persian Letters and the Spirit of
Laws was old and near his end. Rousseau was copying music in a garret.
The Encyclopædia was looked for, but only as a literary project of some
associated booksellers. The Jansenists, who had been so many in number
and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier, had now sunk to a
small minority of the French clergy. The great ecclesiastical body at
length offered an unbroken front to its rivals, the great judicial
bodies. A patriotic minister was indeed audacious enough to propose a
tax upon ecclesiastical property, but the Church fought the battle and
won. Troops had just been despatched to hunt and scatter the Protestants
of the desert, and bigots exulted in the thought of pastors swinging on
gibbets, and heretical congregations fleeing for their lives before the
fire of orthodox musketry. The house of Austria had been forced to
suffer spoliation at the hands of the infidel Frederick, but all the
world was well aware that the haughty and devout Empress-Queen would
seize a speedy opportunity of taking a crushing vengeance; France would
this time be on the side of righteousness and truth. For the moment a
churchman might be pardoned if he thought that superstition, ignorance,
abusive privilege, and cruelty were on the eve of the smoothest and most
triumphant days that they had known since the Reformation.

We now know how illusory this sanguine anticipation was destined to
prove, and how promptly. In little more than forty years after the
triumphant enforcement of the odious system of confessional
certificates, then the crowning event of ecclesiastical supremacy, Paris
saw the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the adoration of the Goddess of
Reason. The Church had scarcely begun to dream before she was rudely and
peremptorily awakened. She found herself confronted by the most
energetic, hardy, and successful assailants whom the spirit of progress