watch over the progress of thought; and the censorship of books was a
daily annoyance to the _philosophes_. By defending the common liberties
of the human mind against the Church, they were combating in their own
cause: and they began by breaking the shackles which pressed most closely
on themselves."

Just so. And they are not to be blamed if they pressed first and most
earnestly reforms which they knew by painful experience to be necessary.
All reformers are wont thus to begin at home. It is to their honour if,
not content with shaking off their own fetters, they begin to see that
others are fettered likewise; and, reasoning from the particular to the
universal, to learn that their own cause is the cause of mankind.

There is, therefore, no reason to doubt that these men were honest, when
they said that they were combating, not in their own cause merely, but in
that of humanity; and that the Church was combating in her own cause, and
that of her power and privilege. The Church replied that she, too, was
combating for humanity; for its moral and eternal well-being. But that
is just what the _philosophes_ denied. They said (and it is but fair to
take a statement which appears on the face of all their writings; which
is the one key-note on which they ring perpetual changes), that the cause
of the Church in France was not that of humanity, but of inhumanity; not
that of nature, but of unnature; not even that of grace, but of disgrace.
Truely or falsely, they complained that the French clergy had not only
identified themselves with the repression of free thought, and of
physical science, especially that of the Newtonian astronomy, but that
they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for centuries past, to exercise
any censorship whatsoever over the thoughts of men: that they had
identified themselves with the cause of darkness, not of light; with
persecution and torture, with the dragonnades of Louis XIV., with the