Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same attitude.

Nor is it erroneous to connect this background with his antagonism to the French Revolution.

What there was most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion with infidelity.

Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with the road to a denial of all faith.

Nothing is more difficult than to deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man grew greatly upon Burke in his later years.