those who alleviate his pain. The good humour of a man elated by
success often displays itself towards enemies. In the same
manner, the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which the
contemplation of great events gives birth, make an object where
they do not find it. Thus, nations descend to the absurdities of
Egyptian idolatry, and worship stocks and reptiles--Sacheverells
and Wilkeses. They even fall prostrate before a deity to which
they have themselves given the form which commands their
veneration, and which, unless fashioned by them, would have
remained a shapeless block. They persuade themselves that they
are the creatures of what they have themselves created. For, in
fact, it is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms
the age. Great minds do indeed re-act on the society which has
made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what
they have received. We extol Bacon, and sneer at Aquinas. But,
if their situations had been changed, Bacon might have been the
Angelical Doctor, the most subtle Aristotelian of the schools;
the Dominican might have led forth the sciences from their house
of bondage. If Luther had been born in the tenth century, he
would have effected no reformation. If he had never been born at
all, it is evident that the sixteenth century could not have
elapsed without a great schism in the church. Voltaire, in the
days of Louis the Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most
of the literary men of that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent
among the defenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of
the lax morality of the Jesuits and the unreasonable decisions of
the Sorbonne. If Pascal had entered on his literary career when
intelligence was more general, and abuses at the same time more
flagrant, when the church was polluted by the Iscariot Dubois,
the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac, and the nation