ce, was Diderot; and with him the whole school of
bold and avowed infidels, who united open atheism with a fierce
democracy. The Encyclopedists professed to know every thing, to
explain every thing, and to teach every thing, they discovered that
there was no God, and taught that truth was a delusion, and virtue but
a name. They were learned in mathematical, statistical, and physical
science, but threw contempt on elevated moral wisdom, on the lessons
of experience, and the eternal truths of divine revelation. They
advocated changes, experiments, fomentations, and impracticable
reforms. They preached a gospel of social rights, inflamed the people
with disgust of their condition, and with the belief that wisdom and
virtue resided, in the greatest perfection, with congregated masses.

[Sidenote: General Influence of the Philosophers.]

They incessantly boasted of the greatness of philosophy, and the
obsolete character of Christianity. They believed that successive
developments of human nature, without the aid of influences foreign to
itself, would gradually raise society to a state of perfection. What
they could not explain by their logical formularies, they utterly
discarded. They denied the reality of a God in heaven, and talked
about the divinity of man on earth, especially when associated masses
of the ignorant and brutal asserted what they conceived to be their
rights. They made truth to reside, in its greatest lustre, with
passionate majorities; and virtue, in its purest radiance, with felons
and vagabonds, if affiliated into a great association. They flattered
the people that they were wiser and better than any classes above
them, that rulers were tyrants, the clergy were hypocrites, the
oracles of former days mere fools and liars. To sum up, in few words,
the French Encyclopedists, "they made Nature, in her outward
manifestations, to be the foundation of all great researches, man to
be but a mass of organization, mind the development of our sensations,
morality to consist in self-interest, and God to be but the diseased
fiction of an unenlightened age. The whole intellect, being
concentrated on the outward and material, gave rise, perhaps, to some
improvements in physical science; but religion was disowned, morality
degraded, and man made to be but the feeble link in the great chain of
events by which Nature is inevitably accomplishing her blind designs."
From such influences, what could we expect but infidelity,