While the proud idealism of the Germans was thus, by its own weight, descending into the level flats of thought, a political movement was agitating Germany.  Simple-minded poets were celebrating atheism with an enthusiasm which seemed sincere; and, at the same time, men who are not simple-minded, journalists and demagogues, were laying hold of the irreligion as a lever with which to make a breach in the social edifice.  In the year 1845, the attention of the Swiss authorities was drawn to certain secret societies, composed of Germans, and having for their object a revolution in Germany, but which had established their basis of operations on the Swiss territory.  The inquiries of the police issued in the discovery of twenty-seven clubs bound together by secret correspondence.  Working-men were induced on various pretexts to attend meetings, of which the real object was only gradually disclosed to them.  If they were reckoned worthy, they were initiated into the plan of a social reform, the basis of which was atheism.[60] One of the principal agents in this work of proselytism, Guillaume Marr, exclaimed:  “Faith in a personal and living God is the origin and the fundamental cause of our miserable social condition.”  And he deduced as follows the practical consequence of his theory:  “The idea of God is the key-stone of the arch of a tottering civilization; let us destroy it.  The true road to liberty, to equality, and to happiness, is atheism.  No safety on earth, so long as man holds on by a thread to heaven.—­Let nothing henceforward shackle the spontaneity of the human mind.  Let us teach man that there is no other God than himself, that he is the Alpha and the Omega of all things, the superior being, and the most real reality.”  We have still to explain the nature of this spontaneity, free from every shackle.  One of the editors of the journal conducted by Marr discloses it by quoting some verses in which Henri Heine expresses the wish to see great vices, bloody and colossal crimes, provided he may be delivered from a worthy-citizen virtue, and an honest-merchant morality![61] A little later, a journal of German Switzerland asserted, that in order to set free man’s natural instincts and propensities, it is indispensable to destroy the idea of God.[62]

These, I am well aware, are the screams of a savage madness.  But after all, and be this as it may, Marr was publishing his journal at Lausanne in 1845, and in 1848 he was named representative of the people, by a considerable majority, in one of the largest cities of Germany.  And this was by no means an isolated fact.  Atheism showed itself in the ephemeral parliament of Frankfort as a sort of party, of which M. Vogt, says the Revue des Deux Mondes, was the great orator.[63]