th of the records
themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one
shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of
England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent
in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile
shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of
dissolution.

All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found
in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a
more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and
not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference
to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with
reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the
middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies
uncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, had
been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away
with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the
immortal _De Imitatione_, in whom the special qualities of Christian
doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout
aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not
the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism
on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal
acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or
else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had
travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked
strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter
case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction
of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined
to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not
governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment,
and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of
property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral
foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a
purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis
of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
alternative to a religion; not seized upon a