The principle of unchangeable laws in nature is intimately connected with the growth of Deism which is a note of this period.  The function of the Deity was virtually confined to originating the machine of nature, which, once regulated, was set beyond any further interference on His part, though His existence might be necessary for its conservation.  A view so sharply opposed to the current belief could not have made way as it did without a penetrating criticism of the current theology.  Such criticism was performed by Bayle.  His works were a school for rationalism for about seventy years.  He supplied to the thinkers of the eighteenth century, English as well as French, a magazine of subversive arguments, and he helped to emancipate morality both from theology and from metaphysics.

This intellectual revolutionary movement, which was propagated in salons as well as by books, shook the doctrine of Providence which Bossuet had so eloquently expounded.  It meant the enthronement of reason—­Cartesian reason—­before whose severe tribunal history as well as opinions were tried.  New rules of criticism were introduced, new standards of proof.  When Fontenelle observed that the existence of Alexander the Great could not be strictly demonstrated and was no more than highly probable, [Footnote:  Plurality des mondes, sixieme soir.] it was an undesigned warning that tradition would receive short shrift at the hands of men trained in analytical Cartesian methods.

11.

That the issue between the claims of antiquity and the modern age should have been debated independently in England and France indicates that the controversy was an inevitable incident in the liberation of the human spirit from the authority of the ancients.  Towards the end of the century the debate in France aroused attention in England and led to a literary quarrel, less important but not less acrimonious than that which raged in France.  Sir William Temple’s Essay, Wotton’s Reflexions, and Swift’s satire the Battle of the Books are the three outstanding works in the episode, which is however chiefly remembered on account of its connection with Bentley’s masterly exposure of the fabricated letters of Phalaris.

The literary debate in France, indeed, could not have failed to reverberate across the Channel; for never perhaps did the literary world in England follow with more interest, or appreciate more keenly the productions of the great French writers of the time.  In describing Will’s coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and all who pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says, “there was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients.”  In the discussions on this subject a remarkable Frenchman who had long lived in England as an exile, M. de Saint Evremond, must have constantly taken part.  The disjointed pieces of which Saint Evremond’s writings consist are tedious and superficial, but they reveal a mind of