assages from various
writers who had predicted it. However ingenious might be a history of
the Reformation before it occurred, the evidence could not be more
authentic and positive than that of the great moral and political
revolution which we have witnessed in our own days.

A prediction which Bishop Butler threw out in a sermon before the House
of Lords, in 1741, does honour to his political sagacity, as well as to
his knowledge of human nature; he calculated that the irreligious spirit
would produce, some time or other, political disorders similar to those
which, in the seventeenth century, had arisen from religious fanaticism.
"Is there no danger," he observed, "that all this may raise somewhat
like _that levelling spirit_, upon atheistical principles, which in the
last age prevailed upon enthusiastic ones? Not to speak of the
possibility that _different sorts of people_ may _unite_ in it upon
these _contrary principles_!" All this literally has been accomplished!
Leibnitz, indeed, foresaw the results of those selfish, and at length
demoralizing, opinions, which began to prevail through Europe in his
day. These disorganizing principles, conducted by a political sect, who
tried "to be worse than they could be," as old Montaigne expresses it; a
sort of men who have been audaciously congratulated as "having a _taste_
for evil;" exhibited to the astonished world the dismal catastrophe the
philosopher predicted. I shall give this remarkable passage. "I find
that certain opinions approaching those of Epicurus and Spinoza, are,
little by little, insinuating themselves into the minds of the great
rulers of public affairs, who serve as the guides of others, and on whom
all matters depend; besides, these opinions are also sliding into
fashionable books, and thus _they are preparing all things to that_
GENERAL REVOLUTION _which menaces Europe_; destroying those generous
sentiments of the ancients, Greek and Roman, which preferred the love of
country and public good, and the cares of posterity, to fortune and even
to life. Our _public spirits_,[190] as the English call them,
excessively diminish, and are no more in fashion, and will be still less
while the least vicious of these men preserve only one principle, which
they call _honour_; a principle which only keeps them from not doing
what they deem a low action, while they openly laugh at the love of
country--ridicule those who are zealous for public ends--and when a
well-inte