While Voltaire was indirectly undermining the religious convictions of mankind, the Encyclopedists more directly attacked the sources of religious belief, and openly denied what Voltaire had doubted.  But neither Diderot nor D’Alembert made such shameless assaults as the apostles of a still more atheistic school,—­such men as Helvetius and the Baron d’Holbach, who advocated undisguised selfishness, and attributed all virtuous impulses to animal sensation.  More dangerous still than these ribald blasphemers were those sentimental and morbid expounders of humanity of whom Rousseau was the type,—­a man of more genius perhaps than any I have named, but the most egotistical of that whole generation of dreamers and sensualists who prepared the way for revolution.  He was the father of those agitating ideas which spread over Europe and reached America.  He gave utterance in his eloquent writings to those mighty watch-words, “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,” that equally animated Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Jefferson.  But the writings of the philosophers will again be alluded to in the next lecture, as among the efficient causes of the French Revolution.

When we contemplate those financial embarrassments which arose from half a century of almost universal war, and those awful burdens which bent to the dust, in suffering and shame, the whole people of a great country; when we consider the absurd and wicked distinctions which separated man from man, and the settled hostility of the clergy to all means of intellectual and social improvement; when we remember the unparalleled vices of a licentious court, the ignominious negligence of the government to the happiness and wants of those whom it was its duty to protect, and the shameless insults which an infamous woman was allowed to heap upon the nation; and then when we bear in mind all the elements of disgust, of discontent, of innovation, and of reckless and impious defiance,—­can we wonder that a revolution was inevitable, if society is destined to be progressive, and man ever to be allowed to break his fetters?

On that Revolution I cannot enter.  I leave the subject as the winds began to howl and the rains began to fall and the floods began to rise, and all together to beat upon that house which was built upon the sand.

AUTHORITIES.

Lacretelle’s Histoire de France; Anquetil; Henri Martin’s History of France; Dulaure’s Histoire de Paris; Lord Brougham’s Lives of Rousseau and Voltaire; Memoires de Madame de Pompadour; Memoires de Madame Du Barry; Revue des Deux Mondes, 1847; Chateau de Lucienne; L’Ami des Hommes, par M. le Marquis de Mirabeau; Maximes Generales du Gouvernement, par Le Docteur Quesnay; Histoire Philosophique du Regne de Louis XV., par le Comte de Tocqueville; Memoires Secrets; Pieces Inedites sous le Regne de Louis XV.; Anecdotes de la Cour de France pendant la Faveur de Madame Pompadour; Louis XV. et la Societe du XVIII.  Siecle, par M. Capefigue; Alison’s introductory chapter to the History of Europe; Louis XV. et son Siecle, par Voltaire; Saint Simon; Memoires de Duclos; Memoires du Duc de Richelieu.