The suppression of the Jesuits met with no greater joy than in the hearts of a certain class of intellectual perverts who may be regarded as the actual founders of modern anti-Christianism; these were the sophists who in that period of the eighteenth century were already flooding France and Europe with a deluge of immoral, irreligious and uncivilized literature.
It is to England that we must go to find the immediate origin of this desolating spirit. There, among the Socinians and Deists, a school arose that taught men to trifle with the sublime truths of revelation and to undermine the foundations of religious belief, men like Shaftesbury, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke, who strove to subject religion to the state, and regarded virtue as a mere human instinct; who declared reason antagonistic to revelation, and saw in the Holy Scriptures nothing more than a collection of pretty fables. It was not until the eighteenth century that the influence of their theories began to ruffle the Catholic atmosphere of France. There were not wanting birds of passage who, while hibernating among the philosophic haunts of London, gathered up the seeds of infidelity to scatter them broadcast upon the soil of France.
ROUSSEAU.
The writings of Montesquieu (1689-1775) display a sneering attitude towards the most sacred teachings and institutions of the Church. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his Social Contract and similar works endeavored to destroy the social order and bring back humanity to primitive barbarism. But more terrible in the rage of his iniquity than all others, in the great war of anti-Christianism, was the arch-infidel, Francois Marie Arouet, later called Voltaire (1694-1778). Of him might have been written the lines which Milton puts into the mouth of Satan:
"To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight;
As being contrary to his high will,
Whom we resist. If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still find means of evil."
Par. Lost, Bk. I.
Born in Paris of a mother whose loose morals made her a by-word to all who knew her, he imbibed at her breast that appetite for lawlessness and iniquity which ruled him to the last hour. His mother dying during his infancy, he became the protege of an abbe who had abandoned the duties of his sacred calling for the allurements of the world. In his boyhood he was sent to the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand, where the perversity of his character manifested itself to such an extent that one of his teachers prophesied that he would one day become the coryphee of deism. Thereafter his career was one of unlicensed depravity. More than once he was arrested and cast into prison; he had reason to hate the Bastille, for he himself had experienced the life of a criminal therein.
VOLTAIRE.