Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathematician and Blainville the
biologist, and in the aesthetic from Homer to Manzoni, but the most
illustrious names in the annals of the various religions and
philosophies, and the really great politicians in all states of
society.[20] Above all, he has the most profound admiration for the
services rendered by Christianity, and by the Church of the middle ages.
His estimate of the Catholic period is such as the majority of
Englishmen (from whom we take the liberty to differ) would deem
exaggerated, if not absurd. The great men of Christianity, from St Paul
to St Francis of Assisi, receive his warmest homage: nor does he forget
the greatness even of those who lived and thought in the centuries in
which the Catholic Church, having stopt short while the world had gone
on, had become a hindrance to progress instead of a promoter of it; such
men as Fénélon and St Vincent de Paul, Bossuet and Joseph de Maistre.
A more comprehensive, and, in the primitive sense of the term, more
catholic, sympathy and reverence towards real worth, and every kind of
service to humanity, we have not met with in any thinker. Men who would
have torn each other in pieces, who even tried to do so, if each
usefully served in his own way the interests of mankind, are all
hallowed to him.

Neither is his a cramped and contracted notion of human excellence,
which cares only for certain forms of development. He not only
personally appreciates, but rates high in moral value, the creations of
poets and artists in all departments, deeming them, by their mixed
appeal to the sentiments and the understanding, admirably fitted to
educate the feelings of abstract thinkers, and enlarge the intellectual
horizon of people of the world.[21] He regards the law of progress as
applicable, in spite of appearances, to poetry and art as much as to
science and politics. The common impression to the contrary he ascribes