The Fortnightly (Volume 10;v. 16) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. No. LVII. New Series.?September 1, 1871. TURGOT'S TWO DISCOURSES AT THE SORBONNE. Is 1750 Turgot was appointed to the honorary office of Prior of the Sorbonne, an elective distinction conferred annually, as it appears, on some meritorious or highly connected student. It was held in the following year by Lomenie de Brienne.1 In this capacity Turgot read two Latin dissertations, one at the opening of the session, and the other at its close. The first of these was upon ' the advantages that the establishment of Christianity has conferred upon tlic human race.'3 Its value, as might well have been expected from the circumstances of its production, is not very high. It is pitched in a tone of exaltation that is eminently unfavourable to the permanently profitable treatment of such a subject. There are in it too many of those eloquent and familiar commonplaces of orthodox history, by which the doubter tries to warm himself into belief, and the believer dreams that he is corroborating faith by reason. The assembly for whom his discourse was prepared, could hardly have endured the apparition in the midst of them of what both rigorous justice and accurate history required to have taken into account on the other side. It was not to be expected that a young student within the precincts of the Sorbonne should have any eyes for the evil with which the forms of the Christian religion, like other growths of the human mind, from the lowest forms of savage animism upwards, have ever alloyed its good. The absence of all reference to one half of what the annals of the various Christian churches have to teach us, robs the first of Turgot's discourses of thtit serious and durable quality which belongs to every other of his writings. It is fair...