There was a moment in the last century when the Gallican church hoped for a return of internal union and prosperity.  This brief era of hope coincided almost exactly with the middle of the century.  Voltaire was in exile at Berlin.  The author of the Persian Letters and the Spirit of Laws was old and near his end.  Rousseau was copying music in a garret.  The Encyclopaedia was looked for, but only as a literary project of some associated booksellers.  The Jansenists, who had been so many in number and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier, had now sunk to a small minority of the French clergy.  The great ecclesiastical body at length offered an unbroken front to its rivals, the great judicial bodies.  A patriotic minister was indeed audacious enough to propose a tax upon ecclesiastical property, but the Church fought the battle and won.  Troops had just been despatched to hunt and scatter the Protestants of the desert, and bigots exulted in the thought of pastors swinging on gibbets, and heretical congregations fleeing for their lives before the fire of orthodox musketry.  The house of Austria had been forced to suffer spoliation at the hands of the infidel Frederick, but all the world was well aware that the haughty and devout Empress-Queen would seize a speedy opportunity of taking a crushing vengeance; France would this time be on the side of righteousness and truth.  For the moment a churchman might be pardoned if he thought that superstition, ignorance, abusive privilege, and cruelty were on the eve of the smoothest and most triumphant days that they had known since the Reformation.

We now know how illusory this sanguine anticipation was destined to prove, and how promptly.  In little more than forty years after the triumphant enforcement of the odious system of confessional certificates, then the crowning event of ecclesiastical supremacy, Paris saw the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the adoration of the Goddess of Reason.  The Church had scarcely begun to dream before she was rudely and peremptorily awakened.  She found herself confronted by the most energetic, hardy, and successful assailants whom the spirit of progress ever inspired.  Compared with the new attack, Jansenism was no more than a trifling episode in a family quarrel.  Thomists and Molinists became as good as confederates, and Quietism barely seemed a heresy.  In every age, even in the very depth of the times of faith, there had arisen disturbers of the intellectual peace.  Almost each century after the resettlement of Europe by Charlemagne had procured some individual, or some little group, who had ventured to question this or that article of the ecclesiastical creed, to whom broken glimpses of new truth had come, and who had borne witness against the error or inconsistency or inadequateness of old ways of thinking.  The questions which presented themselves to the acuter minds of a hundred years ago, were present to the acuter minds who lived hundreds of years before that.  The more