d away. The gallant host
had done its work. The ground was ploughed, the seed was sown, and the
harvest was sure. Famished as they were, and well-nigh desperate at
times, the men of the Revolution nursed the crop as a sacred legacy,
shedding their blood like water to fructify the soil in which it grew.

Superficial readers are ignorant of the mental ferment which went on in
France before the Revolution. Voltaire's policy of sapping the dogmas by
which all tyranny was supported had been carried out unflinchingly.
Not only had Christianity been attacked in every conceivable way, with
science, scholarship, argument, and wit; but the very foundations of
all religion--the belief in soul and God--had not been spared. The
Heresiarch of Ferney lived to see the war with superstition carried
farther than he contemplated or desired; but it was impossible for
him to say to the tide of Freethought, "Thus far shalt thou go and no
farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." The tide poured on
over everything sacred. Altars, thrones, and coronets met with a common
fate. True, they were afterwards fished out of the deluge; but their
glory was for ever quenched, their power for ever gone.

Among the great Atheists who prepared the Revolution we single out
two--Diderot and D'Holbach. The sagacious mind of Comte perceived that
Diderot was the greatest _thinker_ of the band. The fecundity of his
mind was extraordinary, and even more so his scientific prescience.
Anyone who looks through the twenty volumes of his collected works will
be astonished at the way in which, by intuitive insight, he anticipated
so many of the best ideas of Evolution. His labors on the Encyclopaedia
would have tired out the energies of twenty smaller men, but he
persevered to the end, despite printers, priests, and governments, and a
countless host of other obstructions. Out of date as the work is now, it
was the artillery of the movement of progress then. As Mr. Morley says,
it "rallied all that was best in France round the standard of light and
social hope."

Less original, but nearly as bold and industrious, D'Holbach placed his
fortune and abilities at the service of Freethought. Mr. Morley calls
the _System of Nature_ "a thunderous engine of revolt." It was Atheistic
in religion, and revolutionary in politics. It challenged every enemy of
freedom in the name of reason and humanity. Here and there its somewhat
diffuse rhetoric was lit up with the splen