But printing, that unceasing outpouring of the human mind, was to the people a second revelation.  Employed at first exclusively for the Church, for the propagation of ruling ideas, it had begun to sap them.  The dogmata of temporal power, and spiritual power, incessantly assailed by these floods of light, could not be long without being shaken, first in the human mind and afterwards in things, to the very foundations. Guttemberg; without knowing it, was the mechanist of the New World.  In creating the communication of ideas, he had assured the independence of reason.  Every letter of this alphabet which left his fingers, contained in it, more power than the armies of kings, and the thunders of pontiffs.  It was mind which he furnished with language.  These two powers were the mistresses of man, as they were hereafter of mankind.  The intellectual world was born of a material invention, and it had grown rapidly.  The reformed religion was one of its early offspring.

The empire of catholic Christianity had undergone extensive dismemberments.  Switzerland, a part of Germany, Holland, England, whole provinces of France, had been drawn away from the centre of religious authority, and passed over to the doctrine of free examination.  Divine authority attacked and contested in catholicism, the authority of the throne remained at the mercy of the people.  Philosophy, more potent than sedition, approached it more and more near, with less respect, less fear.  History had actually written of the weaknesses and crimes of kings.  Public writers had dared to comment upon it, and the people to draw conclusions.  Social institutions had been weighed by their real value for humanity.  Minds the most devoted to power had spoken to sovereigns of duties, and to people of rights.  The holy boldness of Christianity had been heard even in the consecrated pulpit, in the presence of Louis XIV.  Bossuet, that sacerdotal genius of the ancient synagogue, had mingled his proud adulations to Louis XIV. with some of those austere warnings which console persons for their abasement.  Fenelon, that evangelical and tender genius, of the new law, had written his instructions to princes, and his Telemachus, in the palace of the king, and in the cabinet of an heir to the throne.  The political philosophy of Christianity, that insurrection of justice in favour of the weak, had glided from the lips of Louis XIV. into the ear of his grandson.  Fenelon educated another revolution in the Duke of Burgundy.  This the king perceived when too late, and expelled the divine seduction from his palace.  But the revolutionary policy was born there; there the people read the pages of the holy archbishop:  Versailles was destined to be, thanks to Louis XIV. and Fenelon, at once the palace of despotism and the cradle of the Revolution.  Montesquieu had sounded the institutions, and analysed the laws of all people.  By classing governments, he had compared them, by comparing he passed judgment on them; and this judgment brought out, in its bold relief, and contrast, on every page, right and force, privilege and equality, tyranny and liberty.