It furnishes no motive for action. It inspires no enthusiasm. It
has no missionaries, no crusaders, no martyrs. If the Patriarch
of the Holy Philosophical Church had contented himself with
making jokes about Saul's asses and David's wives, and with
criticising the poetry of Ezekiel in the same narrow spirit in
which he criticised that of Shakspeare, Rome would have had
little to fear. But it is due to him and to his compeers to say
that the real secret of their strength lay in the truth which was
mingled with their errors, and in the generous enthusiasm which
was hidden under their flippancy. They were men who, with all
their faults, moral and intellectual, sincerely and earnestly
desired the improvement of the condition of the human race, whose
blood boiled at the sight of cruelty and injustice, who made
manful war, with every faculty which they possessed, on what they
considered as abuses, and who on many signal occasions placed
themselves gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed.
While they assailed Christianity with a rancour and an unfairness
disgraceful to men who called themselves philosophers, they yet
had, in far greater measure than their opponents, that charity
towards men of all classes and races which Christianity enjoins.
Religious persecution, judicial torture, arbitrary imprisonment,
the unnecessary multiplication of capital punishments, the delay
and chicanery of tribunals, the exactions of farmers of the
revenue, slavery, the slave trade, were the constant subjects of
their lively satire and eloquent disquisitions. When an innocent
man was broken on the wheel at Toulouse, when a youth, guilty
only of an indiscretion, was beheaded at Abbeville, when a brave
officer, borne down by public injustice, was dragged, with a gag
in his mouth, to die on the Place de Greve, a voice instantly
went forth from the banks of Lake Leman, which made itself heard