fferent to the new science and to the various
elements of human nature on which statesmanship must build. Its
political sway is brief, its effects on English and American character
are lasting.

In the next century the master minds stand outside of Christianity.
Voltaire assails the whole ecclesiastical and supernatural fabric with
terrible weapons of hard sense and derision. For the target of his
arrows he has a church at once corrupt, tyrannical, and weak, and a creed
which the best intelligence has outgrown. He heartily scouts the church,
dogma, miracle; admits a vague Deity and a possible hereafter, but cares
little for them; is fearless, jovial, generous,--a rollicking,
comfortable, formidable apostle of negations.

Into the vacuum he creates comes Rousseau, and at his touch there well up
again deep fountains of feeling, belief, desire. Rousseau, too, has left
behind him the church and its dogmas; but he craves love, joy, action,
and finds scope for them. He delights in nature's beauty, and it is the
symbol to him of a God in whom there remains of the Christian Deity only
the element of beneficence. He exhorts men to return to nature, but it
is a somewhat unreal nature, a dream of primeval innocence and
simplicity. He idealizes the family relation, and brings wisdom and
gentleness to the training of the child. He lacks the Hebraic and
Puritan stress on conscience; the mild benevolence of his Deity is
somewhat remote from the ethical need of man and from the actual
procedure or the universe; Rousseau himself is tainted with
sensuality,--a diseased, suffering, pathetic nature, with "sweet strings
jangled," worthy of pity and of gratitude.

In France, the highest intelligence was at war with established
institutions,--the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against the
Catholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one side
persecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion or
attack. In England, a large measure of civil and religious freedom gave
the intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper. The
English genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate.
Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the assault
on the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground, and an
insistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed workings of
the world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to the Christian
scheme of