n writer, "recognized in time and space an endless
theatre for the display of the eternal, and of the living pulsation of
eternal love. By the contemplation of such things, however imperfect,
the natural, even the merely sensible man, was affected by a stupendous
feeling of admiration, well calculated to prepare the way for religious
thoughts. It extended and ennobled his soul to thus regard the past,
present, and future."

French philosophy took its rise in the seventeenth century, but the
philosophers of that age--Descartes, Bayle and others--assumed the soul
of man to be the starting point in all investigations of physical
science. The eighteenth century philosophers went a step further and
rejected all idea of God and the soul. Voltaire, De Montesquieu,
D'Holbach, D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius and the Abbe Raynal, are the
chief minds who shaped the thought of France in the eighteenth century,
and by their cynicism, sensuality, and contempt for law and order,
helped to pave the war for the horrors of the French Revolution. What
they offered to the world the lower classes could only grasp in its
most material sense, and they wrested it indeed to their own, and to
others, destruction.

Voltaire, Diderot, D'Holbach and their school in France, with Hume,
Bolingbroke and Gibbon in England, formed a coterie whose desire it was
to edit a vast encyclopaedia, giving the latest discoveries, in
philosophy and science in particular, and in literature in general.
These men became known as the Encyclopaedists, and their history is
fully set forth by Condillac. They rejected all divine revelation and
taught that all religious belief was the working of a disordered mind,
and that physical sensibility is the origin of all our thoughts.
Alternately gross or flippant, or else both, the French philosophers
offered nothing pure or elevating in philosophic thought. Their
teaching spread to England, where the philosophy of the eighteenth
century, less gross than the French, is chiefly distinguished for being
cold and indifferent, rather than actively opposed, to religion. Hume
is a type of the class of thinkers whom we find uncertain and unworthy
of confidence. The histories of Hume, Robertson and Gibbon are the
offspring of this degraded material philosophy of the eighteenth
century. They surpassed the histories of other nations in
comprehensiveness and power, and became standard works in France and
Germany, but in all of them we can t