days because it had never been heard of. And if (as M. de Tocqueville
heartily allows) the English apologists of Christianity triumphed, at
least for the time being, the cause of their triumph must be sought in
the plain fact that such men as Berkeley, Butler, and Paley, each
according to his light, fought the battle fairly, on the common ground of
reason and philosophy, instead of on that of tradition and authority; and
that the forms of Christianity current in England--whether Quaker,
Puritan, or Anglican--offended, less than that current in France, the
common-sense and the human instincts of the many, or of the sceptics
themselves.]

But the eighteenth century saw another movement, all the more powerful,
perhaps, because it was continually changing its shape, even its purpose;
and gaining fresh life and fresh adherents with every change. Propagated
at first by men of the school of Locke, it became at last a protest
against the materialism of that school, on behalf of all that is, or
calls itself, supernatural and mysterious. Abjuring, and honestly, all
politics, it found itself sucked into the political whirlpool in spite of
itself, as all human interests which have any life in them must be at
last. It became an active promoter of the Revolution; then it helped to
destroy the Revolution, when that had, under Napoleon, become a levelling
despotism; then it helped, as actively, to keep revolutionary principles
alive, after the reaction of 1815:--a Protean institution, whose power we
in England are as apt to undervalue as the governments of the Continent
were apt, during the eighteenth century, to exaggerate it. I mean, of
course, Freemasonry, and the secret societies which, honestly and
honourably disowned by Freemasonry, yet have either copied it, or
actually sprung out of it. In England, Freemasonry never was, it seems,
more than a liberal and respectable benefit-club; for secret societies
are needless for any further purposes, amid free institutions and a free