Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.
We now approach the study of a period remarkable no less in the history of the world than in that of religious thought, in which unbelief gained the victory in the empire of mind, and obtained the opportunity of reconstructing society and education according to its own views. The history of infidelity in France in the eighteenth century forms a real crisis in history, important by its effects as well as its character. For France has always been the prerogative nation of Europe. When wants intellectual or political have been felt there, the life of other nations has beat sympathetic with it as with the heart of the European body. Ideas have been thrown into form by it for transmission to others. It will be necessary to depict the free religious thought, both intellectually and in its political action; to characterise its principal teachers; to show whence it sprung, and to what result it tended; to point out wherein lay the elements of its power and its wickedness; to show what it has contributed to human woe, or perchance indirectly to human improvement.
The source of its influence cannot be understood [pg 164] without recalling some facts of the history of French politics and philosophical speculation. What was the cause why English deists wrote and taught their creed in vain, were despised while living and consigned to oblivion when dead, refrained almost entirely from political intermeddling, and left the church in England unhurt by the struggle; while on the other hand deism in France became omnipotent, absorbed the intellect of the country, swept away the church, and remodelled the state? The answer to this question must be sought in the antecedent history. It is a phenomenon political rather than intellectual. It depended upon the soil in which the seed was sown, not on the inherent qualities of the seed itself.[498]
The church and state have hardly ever possessed more despotic power in any country of modern times, or seemed to all appearances to repose on a more secure foundation, than in France at the time when they were first assailed by the free criticism of the infidels of the eighteenth century. Each had escaped the alterations which had been effected in most other countries. The clergy of France had in the sixteenth century successfully resisted the Reformation, and gained strength by the issue of the civil wars which supervened on it. In the seventeenth century, though compelled to admit toleration of their Protestant adversaries, they had contrived before the end of it to obtain a revocation of the edict, even though the act cost France the loss of a million of her industrious population, and though the enforcing [pg 165] of it had to be effected by the means of the dragonnades, in which a brutal soldiery was let loose on an innocent population.[499] Thus the church, united with rather than subjected to the state, adorned by great names, asserting its national independence in the pride of conscious strength against the metropolitan see of Christendom,[500] possessed a power which, while it seemed to promise perpetuity, stood as an impediment to progress and a bar to intellectual development.
Nor was the cause of liberty more hopeful in relation to the state than the church. The crown, in passing through a similar struggle against the feudal nobility to that of other countries, had succeeded in securing its victory without yielding those concessions to the demands of the people which in our own country were extorted from it by the civil war. The strength gained by the defeat of the nobility in the wars of the Fronde, offered the opportunity for an able sovereign like Louis XIV to dry up all sources of independent power, by centralizing all authority in the monarchy. Proud in the consciousness of internal power and foreign victory, surrounded by wealth and talent, with a court and literature which were the glory of the country, he seemed likely to transmit his power to coming generations. But the inherent weakness of despotism was soon apparent. Unrestrained authority appertains only to the Divine government, because power is there synonymous with goodness; but it is always unsafe in human. The wisdom which partially supplied the place of goodness in Louis XIV being wanting in his successor, unchecked selfishness produced the corruption which brought inevitable ruin.
These remarks on the political state of France will [pg 166] sufficiently show why a free criticism directed against either religion or tyranny should assume revolutionary tendencies, and should manifest an antipathy to social and ecclesiastical institutions, as well as to the principles on which they were supposed to depend.
But the forces operating in the world of mind, as well as in society, must also be understood, in order to estimate the influence of unbelief in France. In a previous lecture we have seen that in the middle of the seventeenth century the philosophy of Descartes had created a complete revolution in modes of thought. It was only in the philosophy of Spinoza that it produced theological unbelief; but by its indirect influence it had led generally to an entire reconsideration of the first data of reasoning, and the method of establishing truth; and thus had stimulated the struggle of reason against faith, of inquiry against credulity, of progress against reaction, and of hopefulness in the future against reverence for the past. The activity of mind displayed in the literature of the reign of Louis XIV is its first expression.[501] But thoughts ferment long in society before they fully express themselves in form: they first exist as suggestions; then they become doubts; lastly, they pass into disbelief. It was not until the time of the regency,[502] which ensued after the death of Louis, that the literature became impressed with a thoroughly new tone.[503]
Other causes of a more direct kind cooperated. The English philosophy of Locke, which marked an epoch in speculation, was introduced at that time. This philosophy however could not have resulted in those speculations which arose in France, if it had not been carried farther by the analysis which Condillac employed in that country, analogous to that of Hume in Scotland. [pg 167] In itself it expressed the reasoning type of mind and thought which reigned throughout the English literature; but the corollaries from it which produced harm were no part of the original system.[504] Condillac, desiring to carry out the analysis of the origin of knowledge, lost sight of the intellectual element in Locke's account of the process of reflection; denied the existence of innate faculties as well as innate ideas; and attempted to show that man's mind is so passive, so dependent on the evidence of the senses for the material of its thoughts, and on language for the power to combine them, that its very faculties are transformed sensations.[505] From these premises it was not hard for his followers to draw the inferences of materialism[506] in philosophy, selfishness in morals, and an entire denial of those religious truths which cannot be proved by sensuous evidence. This philosophy began to leaven the mind of France, and was accepted by nearly the whole of French unbelievers.
Such was the intellectual state of France in reference to the standard of appeal contemporaneously with the political and ecclesiastical condition before described. In the state and church all was authority; all was of the past; in the world of literature and philosophy all was criticism, activity, hope in the future. Into a soil thus prepared the seeds of unbelief on the subject of religion were introduced. We cannot deny that they were imported mainly from England. Doubt had indeed not been wholly wanting in France. In the preceding [pg 168] centuries Montaigne[507] and Charron,[508] and, at the commencement of the one of which we speak, Bayle[509] and Fontenelle,[510] were probably harassed with disbelief, and their influence was certainly productive of doubt. And free thought, in the form of literary criticism of the scriptures, had brought down the denunciation of the French church on Richard Simon.[511] But undoubtedly the direct parent of the French unbelief was English deism.[512] In no age of French history has English literature possessed so powerful an influence.[513] England had recently achieved those liberties of which France felt the need. It had safely outlived civil war and revolution, and had established constitutional liberty and religious toleration. In England the victims of the French oppression found shelter. Being itself free, it became the refuge for the exile, the shelter for the oppressed. It thus became the object of study to the politician, and of love to the philanthropist. Its literature too, in two branches, viz. political inquiry, and, towards the middle of the century, romance, offered subjects for imitation. Montesquieu studied the former; Rousseau and Diderot the latter. But England furnished also a series of fearless inquirers on the subject of religion, whose works became the subject of study and of translation.[514] Voltaire spent three [pg 169] years of exile in England,[515] at the time when the ferment existed concerning Woolston's attack on miracles, and both knew Bolingbroke personally, and translated his writings.
Having now explained the sources of doubt in France; we must next direct our attention to the course of its speculations, and to the chief authors.