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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: have been her enemies. But he mentions another fact which seems to
me to belong neither to the category of religion nor to that of
politics; a fact which, if he had done us the honour to enlarge upon
it, might have led him and his readers to a more true understanding
of the disrepute into which Christianity had fallen in France.
"The ecclesiastical authority had been specially employed in keeping
watch over the progress of thought; and the censorship of books was
a daily annoyance to the philosophes. By defending the common
liberties of the human mind against the Church, they were combating
in their own cause: and they began by breaking the shackles which
pressed most closely on themselves."
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