The Encyclopaedia was virtually a protest against the old organisation, no less than against the old doctrine.  Broadly stated, the great central moral of it all was this:  that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions.  This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism.  A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation.  It was the great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought.  Every social improvement since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another.  The conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him.  The omnipotence of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order, over the infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature—­this was the maxim which brought men of such widely different temperament and leanings to the common enterprise.  Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the questions connected with psychology and the formation of character; how it went down to the very foundation of morals; into what fresh and unwelcome sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology; with what new importance it clothed all the relations of real knowledge and the practical arts; what intense interest it lent to every detail of economics and legislation and government.

The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the encyclopedic fabric rising was very natural.  The teaching of the Church paints man as fallen and depraved.  The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points, alike in letter and in spirit, with the old sacred lore.  Even where it did not clash, its vitality of interest and attraction drove the older lore into neglected shade.  To stir men’s vivid curiosity and hope about the earth was to make their care much less absorbing about the kingdom of heaven.  To awaken in them the spirit of social improvement was ruin to the most scandalous and crying social abuse then existing.  The old spiritual power had lost its instinct, once so keen and effective, of wise direction.  Instead of being the guide and corrector of the organs of the temporal power, it was the worst of their accomplices.  The Encyclopaedia was an informal, transitory, and provisional organisation of the new spiritual power.  The school of which it was the great expounder achieved a supreme control over opinion by the only title to which control belongs:  a more penetrating eye for social exigencies and for the means of satisfying them.