protomartyr was stoned to death at Jerusalem, while he who was to be
the Apostle of the Gentiles stood by "consenting unto his death,"
would any one have supposed that the party of that stoned man were
then and there the strongest power in society? And has not the event
proved that they were so? Because theirs was the most powerful of then
existing beliefs. The same element made a monk of Wittenberg, at the
meeting of the Diet of Worms, a more powerful social force than the
Emperor Charles the Fifth, and all the princes there assembled. But
these, it may be said, are cases in which religion was concerned, and
religious convictions are something peculiar in their strength. Then
let us take a case purely political, where religion, if concerned at
all, was chiefly on the losing side. If any one requires to be
convinced that speculative thought is one of the chief elements of
social power, let him bethink himself of the age in which there was
scarcely a throne in Europe which was not filled by a liberal and
reforming king, a liberal and reforming emperor, or, strangest of all,
a liberal and reforming pope; the age of Frederic the Great, of
Catherine the Second, of Joseph the Second, of Peter Leopold, of
Benedict XIV., of Ganganelli, of Pombal, of D'Aranda; when the very
Bourbons of Naples were liberals and reformers, and all the active
minds among the noblesse of France were filled with the ideas which
were soon after to cost them so dear. Surely a conclusive example how
far mere physical and economic power is from being the whole of social
power. It was not by any change in the distribution of material
interests, but by the spread of moral convictions, that negro slavery
has been put an end to in the British Empire and elsewhere. The serfs
in Russia owe their emancipation, if not to a sentiment of duty, at
least to the growth of a more enlightened opinion respecting the true
interest of the state. It is what men think that determines how they
act; and though the persuasions and convictions of average men are in