They
who can succeed in creating a general persuasion that a certain form
of government, or social fact of any kind, deserves to be preferred,
have made nearly the most important step which can possibly be taken
towards ranging the powers of society on its side. On the day when the
proto-martyr was stoned to death at Jerusalem, while he who was to
be the Apostle of the Gentiles stood by "consenting unto his death,"
would any one have supposed that the party of that stoned man were
then and there the strongest power in society? And has not the event
proved that they were so? Because theirs was the most powerful of then
existing beliefs. The same element made a monk of Wittenberg, at the
meeting of the Diet of Worms, a more powerful social force than the
Emperor Charles the Fifth, and all the princes there assembled. But
these, it may be said, are cases in which religion was concerned,
and religious convictions are something peculiar in their strength.
Then let us take a case purely political, where religion, so far as
concerned at all, was chiefly on the losing side. If any one
requires to be convinced that speculative thought is one of the
chief elements of social power, let him bethink himself of the age
in which there was scarcely a throne in Europe which was not filled by
a liberal and reforming king, a liberal and reforming emperor, or,
strangest of all, a liberal and reforming pope; the age of Frederic
the Great, of Catherine the Second, of Joseph the Second, of Peter
Leopold, of Benedict XIV.
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