The Encyclopædia was virtually a protest against the old organisation,
no less than against the old doctrine. Broadly stated, the great central
moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is
capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of
the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions. This
cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism.
A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the
beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to
asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the
social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social improvement
since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another. The
conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable
for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic
endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him. The omnipotence
of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order, over the
infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature--this was the maxim
which brought men of such widely different temperament and leanings to
the common enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching
bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the questions
connected with psychology and the formation of character; how it went
down to the very foundation of morals; into what fresh and unwelcome
sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology; with what new
importance it clothed all the relations of real knowledge and the
practical arts; what intense interest it lent to every detail of
economics and legislation and government.

The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the encyclopedic fabric
rising was very natural. The teaching of the Church paints man as fallen
and depraved. The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points,
alike in letter and in spirit, with the old sacred lore. Even where it