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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: them their moral force. It was this which drew towards them the
hearts, not merely of educated bourgeois and nobles (on the menu
peuple they had no influence, and did not care to have any), but of
every continental sovereign who felt in himself higher aspirations
than those of a mere selfish tyrant--Frederick the Great, Christina
of Sweden, Joseph of Austria, and even that fallen Juno, Catharine
of Russia, with all her sins. To take the most extreme instance--
Voltaire. We may question his being a philosopher at all. We may
deny that he had even a tincture of formal philosophy. We may doubt
much whether he had any of that human and humorous common sense,
which is often a good substitute for the philosophy of the schools.
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