As a matter of fact the outstanding principles which serve to improve human conduct, are quite simple and understandable, as soon as they have been shorn of the sophistries and illusions with which the pundits clothe them.  The real work of the reformers is to hack away these encumbering theories.  The average European has not followed, and could not follow, the amazing and never-ending disputation on obscure theological points round which raged the Reformation; but the one solid fact which did emerge from the whole was the general realization that whatever the truth might be in all this confusion, it was quite evidently wicked and futile to attempt to compel conformity to any one section of it by force; that in the interests of all force should be withheld; because if such queries were settled by the accident of predominant force, it would prove, not which was right, but which was stronger.  So in such things as witchcraft.  The learned and astute judges of the 18th century, who sent so many thousands to their death for impossible crimes, knew far more of the details of witchcraft than do we, and would beat us hopelessly in an argument on the subject; but all their learning was of no avail, because they had a few simple facts, the premises, crooked, and we have them straight; and all that we need to know in this amazing tangle of learned nonsense, is that the probabilities are against an old woman having caused a storm at sea and drowned a Scottish King.  And so with the French Revolution.  What the Encyclopaedists and other pioneers of that movement really did for the European peoples in that matter, was not to elaborate fantastic schemes of constitution making, but by their argumentation to achieve the destruction of old political sophistries—­Divine Rights of Kings and what not—­and to enable one or two simple facts to emerge clearly and unmistakeably, as that the object of government is the good of the governed, and can find its justification in nothing else whatsoever.  It was these simple truths which, spreading over the world—­with many checks and set-backs—­have so profoundly modified the structure of Christendom.

Somewhere it is related of Montaigne that talking with academic colleagues, he expressed a contemptuous disbelief in the whole elaborate theory of witchcraft as it existed at that time.  Scandalised, his colleagues took him into the University library, and showed him hundreds, thousands, of parchment volumes written in Latin by the learned men of the subject.  Had he read these volumes, that he talked so disrespectfully of their contents?  No, replied Montaigne, he had not read them, and he was not going to, because they were all wrong, and he was right.  And Montaigne spoke with this dogmatism because he realised that he saw clearly that which they did not—­the crookedness and unsoundness of just those simple fundamental assumptions on which the whole fantastic structure was based.