they been in permanent contact with them, creeds more free from certain
faults which seemed to them, in the case of the French Church,
ineradicable and inexpiable? Till then we must have charity--which is
justice--even for the _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century.

This view of the case had been surely overlooked by M. de Tocqueville,
when he tried to explain by the fear of revolutions, the fact that both
in America and in England, "while the boldest political doctrines of the
eighteenth-century philosophers have been adopted, their anti-religious
doctrines have made no way."

He confesses that, "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had
been preached, even before the greater part of the French philosophers
were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the
eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions in England. Able
writers and profound thinkers espoused that cause, but they were never
able to render it triumphant as in France." Of these facts there can be
no doubt: but the cause which he gives for the failure of infidelity will
surely sound new and strange to those who know the English literature and
history of that century. It was, he says, "inasmuch as all those who had
anything to fear from revolutions, eagerly came to the rescue of the
established faith." Surely there was no talk of revolutions; no wish,
expressed or concealed, to overthrow either government or society, in the
aristocratic clique to whom English infidelity was confined. Such was,
at least, the opinion of Voltaire, who boasted that "All the works of the
modern philosophers together would never make as much noise in the world
as was made in former days by the disputes of the Cordeliers about the
shape of their sleeves and hoods." If (as M. de Tocqueville says)
Bolingbroke set up Voltaire, neither master nor pupil had any more
leaning than Hobbes had toward a democracy which was not dreaded in those