rces to
be trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human
intelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their
beneficent results with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm.
Faith in a divine power, devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of
ecstatic, unspeakable reward, these were the springs of the old
movement. Undivided love of our fellows, steadfast faith in human
nature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towards
improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reap
whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the new.

There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of
the revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the
pressure of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one
set of doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants.
Voltaire was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and
Rousseau in a third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton,
Robespierre, represented three different aspirations and as many
methods. Rousseau was the most directly revolutionary of all the
speculative precursors, and he was the first to apply his mind boldly to
those of the social conditions which the revolution is concerned by one
solution or another to modify. How far his direct influence was
disastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we shall have to
examine. It was so various that no single answer can comprehend an
exhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of enthusiastic
feeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance rendered by
that country to the American colonists in a struggle so momentous for
mankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took the ideas and
the phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the native principles
of their own direct Protestantism with principles that were strictly
derivative from the Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his work more
than that of any other one man, that France arose from the deadly decay
which had laid hold of her whole social and political system, and found
that irresistible energy which warded off dissolution within and
partition from without. We shall see, further, that besides being the
first immediately revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the most
stirring of reactionists in religion. His influence formed not only
Robespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jac