they consider us below our calling. Nothing is so humiliating as to feel
that you have shocked the impious. We are therefore obliged to follow an
equivocal line of conduct, and to check libertines not by decision of
character but by keeping them in doubt as to how we receive what they
say. This requires much wit. The state of neutrality is difficult. Men
of the world, who venture to say anything they please, who give free
vent to their humor, who follow it up or let it go according to their
success, get on much better.

"Nor is this all. That happy and tranquil condition which is so much
praised we do not enjoy in society. As soon as we appear, we are obliged
to discuss. We are forced, for instance, to undertake to prove the
utility of prayer to a man who does not believe in God; the necessity of
fasting to another who all his life has denied the immortality of the
soul. The task is hard, and the laugh is not on our side."[Footnote:
Montesquieu, _Lettres persanes_, i. 210, 211, Lettre lxi.]

The prelates appointed to their high offices by Louis XV. and his
courtiers were not the men to make good their cause by spiritual
weapons. There was no Bossuet, no Fenelon in the Church of France of the
eighteenth century. Her defense was intrusted to far weaker men. First
we have the archbishops, Lefranc de Pompignan of Vienne and Elie de
Beaumont of Paris. Then come the Jesuit Nonnotte and the managers of the
Memoires de Trevoux, the Benedictine Chaudon, the Abbe Trublet, the
journalist Freron, and many others, lay and clerical. The answers of the
churchmen to their Philosophic opponents are generally inconclusive.
Lefranc de Pompignan declared that the love of dry and speculative truth
was a delusive fancy, good to adorn an oration, but never realized by
the human heart. He sneered at Locke and at the idea that the latter had
invented metaphysics. His objections and those of the Catholic church to