Returning to the epoch immediately under view, the Christian church then derived a prodigious strength from its respect for equality and legitimately superior minds. It was a society in the highest degree popularised, illimitably accessible and open to all the faculties, to all the noble aspirations, in human nature. Thence sprang its power, much more than from its riches and the illegitimate means of influence which it has too frequently employed. With regard to the second condition of a good government, respect for liberty, the church was greatly deficient. Two evil principles met in it; the one avowed and incorporated, so to speak, in its doctrines; the other introduced into it by human weakness, not as a legitimate consequence of its doctrines. The first was the debasement of the rights of individual reason, the pretension to transmit articles of belief from high to low throughout the whole religious society, without allowing any one the right of private judgment. It is more easy to lay down this pretension as a principle, than to make it actually prevail. A conviction does not penetrate the human intellect, unless the intellect be itself accessory to its admission; it must be made acceptable to reason. In whatever manner it presents itself, whatever sanction it may invoke, reason weighs it, and if it prevail with the human understanding, it is because of its rationality. Thus there is always, under whatever form it may be veiled, an action of individual reason upon the ideas which are pretended to be imposed upon it. It is true, nevertheless, that reason may be perverted; it may to a certain extent nullify or emasculate itself; it may be induced to make a bad use of its faculties, or not to make such use of them as it has a right to do. Such, in fact, has been the consequence of this evil principle admitted into the church, although it never had, and never could have, an unmixed and uncontrollable action. The second evil principle was the right of coercion arrogated to itself by the church--a right contrary to the nature of a religious society, to the origin of the church itself, and to its primitive maxims--a right contested by several of the illustrious fathers of the church, Saint Ambrose, Saint Hilary, and Saint Martin--but which, nevertheless, was upheld, and became a predominant assertion. The pretension of forcing to believe--if we can put these two words together--or of physically punishing belief, as the persecution of heresy--that is to say, contempt for the legitimate liberty of human thought, is an error which was introduced into the church even before the fifth century, and has cost it dear. {98}