[But these philosophers (it will be said) hated all religion.

Before that question can be fairly discussed, it is surely right to
consider what form of religion that was which they found working round
them in France, and on the greater part of the Continent. The quality
thereof may have surely had something to do (as they themselves asserted)
with that "sort of rage" with which (to use M. de Tocqueville's words)
"the Christian religion was attacked in France."

M. de Tocqueville is of opinion (and his opinion is likely to be just)
that "the Church was not more open to attack in France than elsewhere;
that the corruptions and abuses which had been allowed to creep into it
were less, on the contrary, there than in most Catholic countries. The
Church of France was infinitely more tolerant than it ever had been
previously, and than it still was among other nations. Consequently, the
peculiar causes of this phenomenon" (the hatred which it aroused) "must
be looked for less in the condition of religion than in that of society."

"We no longer," he says, shortly after, "ask in what the Church of that
day erred as a religious institution, but how far it stood opposed to the
political revolution which was at hand." And he goes on to show how the
principles of her ecclesiastical government, and her political position,
were such that the _philosophes_ must needs have been her enemies. But
he mentions another fact which seems to me to belong neither to the
category of religion nor to that of politics; a fact which, if he had
done us the honour to enlarge upon it, might have led him and his readers
to a more true understanding of the disrepute into which Christianity had
fallen in France.

"The ecclesiastical authority had been specially employed in keeping