This consciousness of the power and exaltation of their calling, which men of letters now acquired, is much more than the superficial fact which it may at first seem to be.  It marked the rise of a new teaching order and the supersession of the old.  The highest moral ideas now belonged no longer to the clergy, but to the writers; no longer to official Catholicism, but to that fertilising medley of new notions about human knowledge and human society which then went by the name of philosophy.  What is striking is that the ideas sown by philosophy became eventually the source of higher life in Catholicism.  If the church of the revolution showed something that we may justly admire, it was because the encyclopaedic band had involuntarily and inevitably imparted a measure of their own clearsightedness, fortitude, moral energy, and spirit of social improvement, to a church which was, when they began their work, an abominable burden on the spiritual life of the nation.  If the Catholicism of Chateaubriand, of Lamennais, of Montalembert, was a different thing from the Catholicism of a Dubois, or a Rohan, from the vile corruptions of the Jesuits and the grovelling superstitions of the later Jansenists, it was the execrated freethinkers whom the church and mankind had to thank for the change.  The most enlightened Catholic of to-day ought to admit that Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, were the true reformers of his creed.  They supplied it with ideas which saved it from becoming finally a curse to civilisation.  It was no Christian prelate, but Diderot who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the magnificent cry, Detruisez ces enceintes qui retrecissent vos idees!  Elargissez Dieu![103] We see the same phenomenon in our own day.  The Christian churches are assimilating as rapidly as their formula will permit, the new light and the more generous moral ideas and the higher spirituality of teachers who have abandoned all churches, and who are systematically denounced as enemies of the souls of men. Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes! These transformations of religion by leavening elements contributed from a foreign doctrine, are the most interesting process in the history of truth.

The Encyclopaedia became a powerful engine for aiding such a transformation.  Because it was this, and because it rallied all that was then best in France round the standard of light and social hope, we ought hardly to grudge time or pains to its history.  For it was not merely in the field of religious ideas that the Encyclopaedists led France in a new way.  They affected the national life on every side, pressing forward with enlightened principles in all the branches of material and political organisation.  Their union in a great philosophical band gave an impressive significance to their work.  The collection within a single set of volumes of a body of new truths, relating to so many of the main interests of men, invested the book and its writers with an aspect of universality,