THE
SKEPTICAL ERA
IN MODERN HISTORY;
OR,
de ~nfivdlitl Df f  (fifg entk   (fantry
THE PRODUCT OF SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.
BY T?TM. POST.
NEEW  YORK.
CHARLES SCRIBNER, 145 NASSAU STREET.
1856.




ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER,
In the Clerk's Office of the U. S. District Court,.for the Southern District of Nesw York.
w. H. TINSON, STEREOPYPER.                         GEORGE- RUSSELL & CO., PRINTERS.




PREFACE.
FREEDOM  and Faith are the great Tutelar Forces of
modern civilization. Their relation to each other is the
great problem of the age; one whose solution has with it
the destiny of the future. The question presses on us witkl
the more solemn aspect, the more evident becomes the
hastening approach of an era of democratic liberty in
church, state, and society. What condition of the religious
sentiment will consort with that political and social order
of the world? Will faith consist with it? If so, will it
be a vigorous, vital, commanding, organic element, or is it
destined to be timid and feeble, holding with unbelief a
doubtful and divided empire?
A philosophic writer, eminent for accurate and profound
social analysis, De Tocqueville, thus gives his solution of
the above problem.  "I am inclined to believe that our
posterity in the democratic ages will tend more and more
to a single division into two parts; some relinquishing
Christianity entirely, others returning to the bosom of the
Church of Rome." That is, in the ages of democratic freedom, spiritual despotism will be the only conservator of
faith.
Chateaubriand also, in his " Etudes Historiques" claims




1V                     PREFACE.
for Catholicism that it is the religion of democratic society,
whilst he characterizes the Reformed Faith as " Philosophic
truth, clothed with Christian form, attacking religious truth"having achieved for society a change from the military to
the civil and industrial genius, and "able to point, amid the
ruins it has wrought, simply to some field it has planted, and
some mnanufactures it has established." Nor are these writers
alone in their forecast of the future, or their estimate of the
relations of Protestantism to democracy and faith. Sentiments like the above are rife in the literature of the day.
They are the cant of a school; a school not of the Catholic
communion alone.  Protestant writers of profound and
tasteful culture, of devout and earnest tone, and of a seductive plausibility and grace, join in their utterance.
Protestantism, they tell you, is a religion of negations;
its philosophy that of doubt, denial, irreverence and insurrection; its triumphs logical, economic, administrative,
industrial, fiscal; its genius cold, hard, practical, materialistic; unheroic, unideal, undevout —the very antipodes of
exalted religious passion or faith. These are to find shelter
alone under'he shadow of an ecclesiastical absolutism.
Thus the democratic ages are to be the millennium of spiritual despotism; both because such despotism will, by
natural affinity attract those ages, and because it alone will
be able to keep alive religious sentiment and belief during
their progress.  Thus, in many quarters Protestantism
seems afraid of its own life-principles, and verging towards
the suicide of renouncing them. But before joining in this
deadly work, we are compelled to pause and inquire. Is
the above solution of the religious problem of society the
true one?  Is despotism  the only keeper of faith? An era
of entire liberty, of necessity, an era of unbelief?  What
facts authorize an augury so gloomy?  The advocates of




PREFACE.                      V
sentiments above alluded to, claim that history makes for
them, and point in proof to the infidel cycle following the
Lutheran reform. The era of irreligious eclipse and the catastrophe of the world which closed it, they arraign as crimes
of liberty-of Protestantism. It was this, they argue, which
poisoned modern civilization.  It was this which, by the
revolution in philosophy, and the insurrection of mind
against authority, which it inaugurated; and  by the
dethronement of the religious idea and the enthronement of
that of wealth over European civilization, wrought the ruin
of the world's faith. This was to society the fountain of
doubt and irreverence, and of materialism, sensualism, and
Mammonism, that corrupted the world and prepared its
overthrow.
But it has seemed to the writer of this work, that their
very witness confutes them; that it requires no very acute
or profound analysis to trace the infidelity of the eighteenth
century to a widely different source. To ascribe the skepticism of the eighteenth century to the religious revolution
of the sixteenth, is to ascribe a stream to the cascade down
which its waters may have previously flowed. It were as
philosophical to attribute to the overflow of a dammed-up
flood gushing down one side its reservoir, its resurgent overflow  on another.  Such a cascade, was the Lutheran
reform, in the progress of modern mind: such a flow and
resurgent overflow from the dammed-up flood of European
thought, were the religious and philosophical revolutions
of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries-independent
consequences of a common force.
Another cause, patent and portentous, stands out in
~.Etnean prominence in that landscape of ruin-a cause, the
direct antithesis of liberty. To trace this cause, to show
its wide-spread mischievousness, imparting a malign efficiency




vi                    PREFACE.
to causes merely secondary or occasional, and to exhibit its
essential and implacable hostility to genuine faith, is th e
aim of these pages; an aim pursued through the relations
historical and philosophical, of.the phenomenon we are considering.
In pursuance of this aim, I have first attempted to exhibit
the fact we are to explain-the nature and extent of that
strange defection of faith that marked the eighteenth century. We, then, consider its causes; and first those which
are secondary and occasional; such as e. g., the low and
relaxed moral tone of the world's mind at the time the
epidemic of unbelief set in-the century and a half of religious agonism and arms which preceded the revolution in
philosophy inaugurated by Bacon and Des Cartes in physics
and metaphysics, and by Luther in the realm of religionand the rise of the idea of wealth to the ascendency in
cabinets of governments, and in general society.  Our view
is then directed to the "_ FsLs et origo mnaloritm," the great
CAUSE OF CAUSES of the evil we investigate; viz: despotism,
despotism both secular and spiritual, but with especial and
portentous preeminence of the latter.  Our investigation
then, brings us to the geographic focus and centre of the
plague:-France.  Its position in European civilizationits civil and ecclesiastical constitution and history —its
court, monarchy, church, literature-these are seen through
the malign influence of spiritual despotism, directed to the
subversion of belief; and finally resulting in the organization of a conspiracy and crusade against the faith of the
world.
Having traced the evil cause above noted, i. e., despotism,
to its consequences in France, we next inquire into its
effects in other countries of Europe, —those especially
claimed by spiritual despotism as monuments of her power




PREFACE.                     vii
to guard nations from infidelity-viz.: Italy and Spain. A
brief view of the manner in which she has conserved faith
in the two peninsulas closes our survey.
Such is in general the plan and aim of this work. If I
shall have been to any degree thereby instrumental of
adding in any mind to the elements of hopefulness and c.ourage in the solution of the great problem indicated, or of
giving confidence to the confession of the great principles
of Protestant liberty, or shall have contributed aught to
vindicate for the human soul prerogatives claimed by its
imperishable instincts, warranted by the great charter of its
faith, I shall feel that this humble effort is not altogether
without service to the Great King of truth to whom it is
my wish to dedicate it.
T. M. P.
St. Louis, Oct. 20,1855.








CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE SKEPTICISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY,
ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.
The Skeptical Era in Modern History —An Eclipse —The Arscnal of
conflicting Philosophic Schools —Skepticism, the Epidemic of the
world through an entire Historic Cycle-Its changing GeniusSkepticism inLiterature-In Philosophy-The Philosophic Anarchs
and Revolutionists-Skepticism  in Belles-lettres, Criticism, Art,
Poetry, History, Oratory-Skepticism in Place and Power-Frederick of Prussia, Joseph of Austria, and Catherine of RussiaSkepticism in the Million-Skepticism becomes a Fanaticism-A
Nemesis-The Infidelity of the Eighteenth Century; more a War
with Facts than Creeds; more with the Church than ChristianityIts geographic Origin and Theatre....  9
CHAPTER II.
CAUSE OF THE INFIDELITY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
A century and a half precedent of Religious Passion and War;
Relaxation, Exhaustion, and Reaction consequent- Position of the
Religious Liberties of Nations at its close-Dethronement of the
Religious Idea-Causes and Consequences-Religious Wars-Who
was responsible for them and their Mischiefs to Faith-Aspect of
the World at the opening of the Skeptical Era melancholy and
portentous-Its Lessons...6




X                      CONTENTS.
CHAPTER  III.
REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.
Revolution in Philosophy —A necessity of Social Progress perverted
by Spiritual Despotism to the destruction of Faith —Protestantism
a Revolutionist in Philosophy-Different Philosophic Methods
-Aristotelian-Scholastic-Baconian-Mediaeval Philosophy, the
instrument of Spiritual Despotism-Aristotle and the Pope,
Joint Monarchs and High Priests of Thought and Faith-Revolution in Philosophy, an emancipation of mind-Its position in the
Map of Modern History-Eras of Religious, Philosophical, and
Political Revolution —Futility and fruitlessness of the Old Philosophy-A barren toil in an endless circle-A blind and fetter of
Mind-Its Overthrow a Necessity-Why it dragged Faith with it
in its Fall-Different Results in different Countries-Disasters to
Faith, the result of Spiritual Despotism-Protestantism as Revolutionist in Philosophy a mighty Benefactor-Plea of the Baconian
Philosophy.. 57
CHAPTER IV.
MAM ONISM.
Rise of the Idea of Wealth to the Ascendency in European Society
-Causes-Subsidence  of Religious Passions-Old paths of
National Aggrandizement closed up-Transfer of Ambition and
Enterprise to new Desertions-Progress of Society in Wealth and
Productive Art-The Era of Economies-Mississippi SchemesEast Indies-Ventures-lSouth Sea Bubbles-The Money-God
Supreme-The new Philosophy his Minister-Acme of his Reign at
Paris under the Regent of Orleans-Law's Banking Scheme —The
Saturnalia of Mammon —Rise of the Idea of Wealth a Necessity
of Social Progress-Why so Disastrous to Faith?-Money-mania
in France and England Compared-Dangers to Modern Society
from Mammonism.91
CHAPTER V.
SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.
Spiritual Despotism, the Cause of Causes —Era of Absolutism-Double Despotism  over Europe-Treaty of Westphalia —Military




CONTENTS.                        Xi
Monarchies-Hopelessness and helplessness of the Millions-Intellectual repression-Mind driven from the Practical to the Speculative-License of Speculative Thought-The World UnderminedWar on Private Judgment-A War on the Faith of Nations —The
Spiritual Power Darkened and Emasculated —Intellectual imbecility of the Church-Ecclesiastical Literature in Protestant and
Catholic Europe..                117
CHAPTER VI.
SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.
Despotism Corrupts the Spiritual Power, through Hierarchy, Confessional, Celibacy, Separation of Power from the People; Peculiar
Corruptions of Politico-Ecclesiastical Despotism, especially around
the Thrones of Central Europe. in the 17th and 18th centuries —
Cardinal Dubois-Regent of Orleans-Louis 15th-Christianity
made a Religion of Force-Terrible pressure of Spiritual Despotism
in the precedent ages-Reaction as the Force applied-England and
France compared-Christianity hated of the Nations as the ally
of Secular Tyranny —Infidelity from Superstition-from Infallibility-Essential and immortal malignancy of Spiritual Despotism..... 144
CHAPTER VII.
FRANCE.
France the most Powerful Generator and Diffuser of InfidelityHer Position in Modern History-The Model Kingdom of Europe
-Oracle of Civilization-Her Early Culture-Genius-Language
-Court Literature-Political Ascendency-Self-diffusivenessCauses of Infidelity in her Civil and Ecclesiastic Constitution and
History-Religious Wars-Albigenses —Huguenots-Separation of
the Actual from the Ideal the widest-Reaction of Repressed
Mind most Passionate-Daring and Revolutionary Despotism in
France in the 17th and 18th Centuries-Absolutism of Louis XIV.
-Its Mischief-Two Great Crimes of the French Church and
Monarchy  Generative  of Infidelity - Ecclesiastic Barbarism
extending down toward the close of the 18th Century-Torture
and Execution at Abbeville 1776-Despotism  in France applied
to a Mind the most Active, Daring, Witty and Philosophic in
Europe...177




Xii                     CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VIII.
FRANCE.
French Literature of the 18th century-Infidel Writers and Savans
-Mission of Infidelity organized-Its Apostles and Evangelists,
Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists-Their Quarry, the
French church-Its Corruption, Ignorance, Superstitions and
Cruelties-Jesuitism-Its Expose and Fall —Money-madness in
France-The Primal Fountain of her Infidelity-Politico-Ecclesiastical Despotism.                                   203
CHAPTER IX.
SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY AND SPAIN.
ITALY-Spiritual Despotism a generator of Infidelity in Italy and
Spain-Italian History mutilated and stifled-Its silence significant
— Insurrection of Mind indicated by the measures of RepressionTheir Multitude and Atrocity-Censorships-Proscriptions-Crusades-Massacres-Dominicans-Franciscans-The InquisitionGlimpses of Infidelity in Italian History and Literature-Infidelity
a necessity of Pontifical History applied to the Italian mind-The
Troubadour-Dante-Petrarch-Arnold of Brescia-SavonarolaInfidel Scholars -Monarchs-Popes-Repressive measures of the
Sixteenth Century —Their utter mercilessness-Terror-Silence
-Italy stifled but not believing.. 229
SPAIN.-Orthodoxy of Spain-No Spasm in a Corpse-The. Inquisition, the instrument of Spanish Faith-Its mystery and terror —
War on Books —Index Expurgatorus — Death struggle of the
Spanish mind, 1559-1570-Spanish Thought, Literature, Civilization, Manhood fall together-Silence not belief-The Peninsula
still seething with insurgent Infidelity-Three Realms of Spiritual
Despotism compared.                                  246
CONCLUSION.
Resume of the Argument —Lessons for the Times-Doom of Spiritual Despotism.                                       256




CIHAPTER I.
THE SKEPTICISM  OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.
The Skeptical Era in Modern History —An Eclipse-The Arsenal of
conflicting Philosophic Schools-Skepticism, the Epidemic of the
world through an entire Historic Cycle-Its changing GeniusSkepticism inLiterature-In Philosophy-The Philosophic Anarchs
and Revolutionists-Skepticism in Belles-lettres, Criticism, Art,
Poetry, History, Oratory-Skepticism in Place and Power-Frederick of Prussia, Joseph of Austria, and Catherine of RussiaSkepticism in the Million-Skepticism becomes a Fanaticism-A
Nemesis-The Infidelity of the Eighteenth Century; more a War
with Facts than Creeds; more with the Church than ChristianityIts geographic Origin and Theatre.
TAE period through which our proposed discussion
conducts us, was eminently  the  skeptical era in
modern history; an era brilliant, powerful, daring,
-but melancholy and ruinous. It bequeathed to the
Present, lessons of vast import. The eighteenth century may be fitly defined a period of Religious
Eclipse in modern civilization. The definition is
significant and descriptive of the fact.
The period was one of deep and wide occultation
of the religious element in modern civilization-an
eclipse, not a sunset-for the orb of Christian Light




THE SKEPTICAL ERA:              10
and Life was still climbing the skies. The world
passed into profound shade —but though dark and
chill, it was not the shadow of night. It was an
eclipse in which the satellite lunar orb-the reflector of the great central light-came between the
earth  and that light.  The CHuRCH intervened
between God and the world, between humanity and
Jesus Christ, and history consequently moves on
through a cycle oflurid and disastrous gloom.
It is a period of profound interest in the study of
the Past.  The Infidelity of the eighteenth century
is as important a theme as the revolution which
sprang from it. It is a period of startling contrasts;
according to aspects presented from different points
of view, it is the most hopeful or most fearful, the
most disastrous or most successful, the most glorious
or most shameful in modern history; and it throws
its light and gloom over the age in which we are,
and down the distant future. These very contrasts
and the multiformity of aspects make it one of
solemn and varied significance, and of profoundest
instruction. They have made it also the "locus communnis"-the commonplace topic-of argument or
warning, of vindication or invective, for opposite
schools of ecclesiastical and social philosophers; the
arsenal from which the absolutist and the liberal,
the conservative and the reformer, the reactionary




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.          11
and the progressive, the Romanist and the Protestant,
alike derive their weapons; each challenging it as
argument and justification of itself and as the condemnation and scandal of its antagonist.
The one school regards this era as almost sheerly
infernal; the other views it as bringing with its
crime and ruin, vast blessings; but both alike brandish, each at the other, its sins and its shames, in derision and anathema, as the direct and necessary
sequence of its adversary's distinctive principles.
But read the phenomena of the proposed period differently as they may, all parties unite in regarding
it as furnishing lessons of vast import for society and
the church in our age.
We purpose as we may be able to read and interpret these lessons; to inquire what causes pushed
society for such a period upon such a career of illusion, impiety, and ruin. We may have occasion to
track to their historic consequences, principles of
antagonistic philosophical and ecclesiastic schools
that are contending for the possession of our age;
and may be able thus in looking over this page of
history, blotted so much with tears and blood and
shame, to detect dangers that attach to the present,
and catch glimpses of a prophecy projected down
the future.  A chapter that has cost so much and
effected so much for humanity, ought not to pass




12             THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
without imparting important instructions. As the
readiest means of deriving those instructions, we propose to investigate and track to historic origin, the
great central fact of the period-the germ and exponent of its moral disease-its SKEPTICISM, and to interrogate it both as cause and effect.
Whence then arose that occultation of faith that
darkened Europe during the last part of the seventeenth, and the entire course of the eighteenth century? striking through society with chill and paralysis during the first part of this period, emasculating
and corrupting it, and finally draping its sunset in
crimson glooms?
But first, let us endeavor to describe and define
the phenomenon we propose to investigate. Let us
aim rightly to conceive of that strange and portentous condition of the world's mind, we are to analyze,
and trace to its origin.
The phenomenon is as patent as it is baleful; is
one fearfully unique, one most distinctively marked.
It stands in the landscape of the past, in the prominence of a volcanic mountain, strange, unmistakable,
portentous.  It is the great feature of a historic
cycle. It strikes one at the first glance that some
strangely malignant and disastrous influences must
have moved on the human mind during the eighteenth century, to drive it from the regions of faith.




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.           13
Infidelity is undoubtedly ever more or less preva-lent in society. The ultimate philosophy of this is
unquestionally that announced by the Apostle: "men
do not choose to retain God in their knowledge."
Man hid from his God in Eden, and his history is
full of the same attempt: so it will be to the end.
"When the son of man cometh, shall He find faith
on the earth?" is our Saviour's significant inquiry.
But in the historic view before us, it is the epide
mic of the world for a century. A moral plague has
struck through Christendom — through its entire
thought and feeling, its manners, literature, legislation, its philosophy, its poetry, its oratory; through
all its private and public life; through all its social
order from the camp to the altar, and from the
galley to the throne; and through its domestic and
international politics. It imbues the European mind
and life as a master feeling; yea at last, strange as
it may seem for a thing ordinarily so feeble as unbelief, as a master passion: all Europe hisses with a
scoffing skepticism  which gradually changes to a
scream  of maniac rage.  The genius of unbelief
presides everywhere. In the chamber of the voluptuary, the academy of the savant, the conclave of
hierarchies, the salons of the witty and beautiful, and
finally in national assemblies tempestuous with revolution, it sits-not a Miltonic Satan " with the starry




14            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
grandeur of darkness" on his brow, defiant though
believing and despairing-but a sneering Mephistophiles, in whose glance the flowers of Christian
civilization wither. Hionor, honesty, chastity as well
as piety, seem to flee like Astrea of old from the
earth. Fraud, cunning, perfidy, avarice, creep like
a chill malaria through all the highways and by-ways
of the world. With them accompany sensualism,
luxury, prodigality, and cruel rapacity.  Between
nations public law is prostrated; faith and morality
seem perished. The great European family of states
seems converted into a band of picaroons and robbers, now uniting, now quarrelling on the question
of mutual dismemberment and plunder. First Saxony, then Maria Theresa of Austria, then Frederick
of Prussia, and finally, unhappy Poland, present the
quarry for these conspiracies of miscreant cabinets.
Everywhere men doubt, disbelieve, deny; and in
regard to every interest. Under the deadly paralysis, the society of the world seems going into dissolution; all its ordinary bands are unloosed. There
is np God in its temples; no sincerity in its worship;
no belief in its creed; no morality in its policy or
practice. The soul of the world seems materialized,
sensualized, mammonized. Society is dying of the
want of faith —faith in religion or in virtue-faith in
man or in God. With faith perishing have perished




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTEND.           15
heroism and truth, chivalry and law; and the order
of the world is undermined. At first the malady of
which we speak, strikes through Christendom  as a
cold plague; but toward the close of the period we
are reviewing, it changes to a delirious fever. The
Mephistophiles of the first act, appears at the catastrophe an avenging flaming Apollyon.
If in proof and illustration of the above statements
we look at some of the various departments of
thought and action in those ages, at some of the
great thinkers and actors in them, we find writers of
every class; legists, publicists, statesmen, poets, philosophers, economists, ecclesiastics; we find also
courts, kings, generals, hierarchs and the general
spirit and tendencies of the masses, all imbued with
a religious skepticism.
First let us look at the utterance of the era in its
literature.  This we find almost universally skeptical.  We shudder at its bad eminence in this
respect, at the human mind for a century of most
mighty, successful and brilliant achievement, constantly expending its energies against the Most High;
lifting like a mad Titan against the pillars of elder
civilization-against its faith, philosophy and order;
and in its struggle to emancipate itself, hurling its
broken fetters at the throne of God.  We tremble
when we contemplate the dark inundation of cor



16            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
rupting thought poured forth like a river of infernal
night for one hundred years on the mind of the
world! and, how the floods of an ungodly literature
gather around the city of our God! reason, philosophy, eloquence, imagination, leading on the attack:
poesy, art, wit, grace and beauty hanging their
glittering banners above the impious onset. Truly,
"The floods have lifted up, 0 Lord, the floods have
lifted up their voice. The floods lifted up their
waves.  But the Lord on high was mightier than
many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the
sea.~'
Guizot characterized the eighteenth century as
one distinguished from its predecessors by the fact,
that in it the hAUMan mind seems the supreme and
almost sole actor, to the comparative exclusion of
cabinets and governments. It was one also in which
the human mind appears animated by a spirit of
universal free inquiry, making everything the subject of question, doubt and system; avenging itself
for its exclusion from affairs, by the most daring and
boundless license in the realms of speculative
thought; and in that realm respecting no external
fact or institution, and standing in awe before no
authority and no principle. Such a mind looks forth
on you from all its literature. You admire its freedom and power; are appalled at its irreverence and




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.           17
impiety. You tremble when you think of the shock
that must ensue when the ideal world it builds, shall
come, as it must in time, in collision with the
Actual.
Such is the general spirit of all thought during
this period.  That in the domain of literature, it
should have taken primary and especial possession
of philosophy, was natural. Here obviously it must
have entrenched itself. Here we know, must have
been its citadel, if not its fountain.  But we are
startled to note the extent to which it seems to be
held, as by demoniacal possession, with a spirit of
universal Skepticism, and armed only with the logic
of insurrection and destruction. The foundations of
aZl belief are sapped by it.  It boldly questions
everything.  It revolutionizes the primal method
and the first principles of all faith. It applies its
skeptical method to all departments and to every
interest; finance, political economy, chemistry, natural history-to physics and mathematics as well as
to logic, ethics and criticism; and in these it works
much beneficient emancipation  and reform.  It
applies its revolutionary method to questions of
social order-to politics, laws, the institutions of
public and private life, to manners, marriage, property, government, and finally to religion.  All
these it undermines; the order of the world topples




18            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
over an abyss.  From  Montaigne, Montesquien,
Voltaire and Rousseau, to the last of the Gironde,
the leading minds of France-the centre and model
of European civilization-had labored in this work
of undermining with the might and brilliancy of
fallen spirits.  "From the seat of geometry to the
consecrated pulpit," says Lamartine, "the philosophy of the eighteenth century had invaded and
altered everything. D'Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Helvetius, La Harpe
were the church of the new era. One sole thought
animated these minds-the revolution of ideas.
Arithmetic, science, history, society, economy, politics, the stage, rmorals, poetry —all seemed as a
vehicle of the modern philosophy. It ran through
all the veins of the times.  It had enlisted every
genius, spoke every language."
From Louis XIV. to Louis XVI. the age had been
prodigal of great men in France. All these an infidel
philosophy had drawn within its train, and formed
of them a constellation of such brilliancy, that it
drew the gaze and worship of mankind-made Paris
the Rome or Babylon of European civilization.
Amid these philosophic anarchs and revolutionists,
Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and their compeers,
badly eminent as they were, belong to the moderates
compared with the schools that sprang from them.




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.         19
Wide and fearful was the abyss they opened; but
beneath that depth "' a lower deep" still yawned-a
deep below the throne of God, below the very
religion of nature. In this, with infernal daring and
hate, labored the cohort of the atheist philosophers
and anarchs of the revolution, aiming to whelm in
one ruin not only Christianity and Deism, but all
moral distinctions and ideas.  Virtue, vice, right,
wrong, with moral government, law, retribution,
marriage, property —all were figments of superstition, long mocking and vexing man; the banishment
of which, together with the vanishing humbugs of
God, Immortality, Heaven and Hell, was to inaugurate the Golden Age. To this foul crew belonged
the obscene and bloody fanatics of unbelief that
formed the pageant of the Goddess of Reason of
1T92.
The doctrines of this school are identified by
Menzel, in his History of Literature, with those of
Heine, who, though of a subsequent generation, may
be regarded as representative and disciple of the
same school. His impious ravings are only the echo
of the " Free Philosophy," so called, and for convenience sake, may here be given as a resume of it:
"Heine," says Menzel, "called Christianity a
miserable and bloody religion for criminals, and
Christ a haggard, bloody Jew, who had robbed the




20            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
world of all its joys, and destroyed the beautiful
religion of Paganism."  "lIle paints before us how
the whole garrison of Heaven must be put to the
sword. How God is weltering in his blood, and.
immortality is lying at its last gasp. He declares
the distinction between good and evil onlyr a crazy
dream of Christianity; that there is no such thing as
vice; that nature is diyine; that nature may allow
itself in every indulgebce and never sin. Matter is
God. Sensual enjoy4ent alone is holy. Sensual
festivals must take the place of Christian ordinances.
After submitting to oppression so long, the senses
must avenge themselves by orgies of uninterrupted
debauchery. All mankind must constitute themselves into a republic of the happy, and no longer
toil and starve, but eat pies, drink sack, and embrace
fair flesh."
But enough; the above may suffice to show the
deeps to which the sensational philosophy had sunk,
and was aiming to drag down society.
Thus everywhere had the disciples of the new
philosphy labored in their bad vocation, till they
had unsettled the faith of Christendom, and brought
society to the verge of an abyss. Thought everywhere was skeptical and revolutionary-the human
mind everywhere insurgent against the traditionary,
the old, the revered;. and everywhere moving on




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.         21
over the wrecks of philosophic systems and religious
faith, to the destruction of all the outward forms and
the vital order of society; a deadly gilded illusion
beckoning it onward, and projecting a golden age on
what proved, as the illusion faded, a dark, weltering,
bloody chaos.
Nor was this skeptical tendency restricted to any
peculiar philosophic school. The sensational, the
ideal, the mystic —the disciples of Des Cartes and
Kant, as well as of Locke, on the continent at least,
develop this disastrous bias; with all degrees of
doubting indeed, but all moving the same darkening
way to absolute unbelief. So much did this melancholy tendency mark the age, that those who were
themselves'devout and earnest believers, seemed,
through the use or abuse of the philosophic systems
which they originated or advocated, transmuted by
the all-pervading spirit of the age into abettors of
unbelief and irreligion. Thus Locke, Des Cartes,
3Malebranche, Leibnitz, and even Fene'lon and Pascal by the consequences to which their principles
were driven, seemed forced into strange coadjutorship with Diderot, lIelvetius, and Voltaire. Hobbes,
Gassendi, Kant, and Spinoza, are succeeded by
those who, from the want of harmonizing and
limiting eclecticism, taking up their principles,
carried them to wild extravagances of skepticism and




22             THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
misbelief, and not unfrequently to atrocious dissoluteness and stark atheism.
Helvetius, iHolbach, IHebert, Chaumette, Cloots,
Marat follow  on. Finally, all ends in a bloody
debauch of blasphemous anarchy. As in time of
pestilence all diseases run into the prevailing disease
or assume its type, so in the eighteenth century all
moral and  intellectual distemperatures, running
directly to religious skepticism, make it as the
epidemic  malady  of the era.  In  England  the
sensational philosophy speedily becomes skeptical, as:in case of Hobbes and HIume.  In France the philosophy of Locke transplanted had brought forth the
fruit of a gross materialism which warred on God,
the soul, and immortality-a mere creed of insurrection and destruction directed. against the social,
political, and religious world. Voltaire and Rousseau were the great apostles of this gospel of
unbelief; the encyclopeedists, expounders, and evangelists; and from Paris, the philosophic Jerusalem,
it had gone forth to possess the nations,
"As from the Python's mystic cave of yore,
The oracles that set the world in flame,
Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more."
"The whole history of the literary society of
France during the latter half of the eighteenth cen



ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.         23
tury," says Morell, "is but a comment on the
progress of sensationalism towards its ultimate
climax. The school of Voltaire shows the effect of
it while still incomplete and shrinking from the hard
materialism, that blind fatality and daring atheism,
to which it afterward attained. But the encyclopaedia is its great embodiment. Man is to it but a
mass of organization; mind the development of our
sensations; morality is self-interest, and God the
diseased fiction of an unenlightened and enthusiastic
age."
In other countries of central Europe the idealism
of Des Cartes had passed through Spinoza to Pantheism, or had hardened to adamantine mechanic
fatalism; or as in Germany, pushing -all belief into
the region of myths and dreams, it had overcast the
whole land with doubts and phantasms, till it seemed
as though the ivory gate through which, according
to ancient fables, wicked illusions and lying phantoms went forth from the underworld to abuse mankind, had opened from underneath it, and had sent
forth glittering inanities to wander over Europe.
The process through which the sensational and ideal
systems alike led to infidelity, is not relevant to my
aim to note.  I mark simply as indicating the
tendency of the age, the fact that both alike conducted to unbelief.




24               THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
Thus had PHILosoPHY labored in the eighteenth
century in the destruction of Faith.  She brought to
humanity  vast blessings.   She  emancipated  the
human mind; but in tearing down the walls of its
prison, she tore down also temple and throne. Her
sons, a mighty brood-mighty for good or ill-stand
before us in the landscape of that age, like the sons
of Elder Night on the lightning-blasted plains of
Phlegra.
" Their steep aim was Titan-like, on daring doubts to pile,
Thoughts which should call down thunder.
They made themselves a fearful monument,
The wreck of old opinion, things which grew
Breathed from the birth of time. The veil they rent,
And what behind it lay, all Earth shall view.
But good with ill, they also overthrew,
Leaving but ruins."
If we look at other departments of literature, we
find the same distemperature of skepticism circulating  in the veins  of all of them.   Through  all
Belles-lettres and fcetion it insinuated itself; from the
romance of Marmontel, St. Pierre and the Heloise
of
"The self-torturing sophist-wild Rousseau, who knew
How to make madness beautiful, and cast
O'er erring deeds and thoughts a heavenly hue,
Of words like sunbeams, dazzling as they passed;"from these to the nameless and abominable herd of




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.         25
miscreant novelists that drugged and intoxicated the
French mind before and in the saturnalia of the
Revolution, it pervaded all.
Criticism was possessed by the same genius of
unbelief. This glittered in its wit: this hissed in its
sneer. Dipped in its ven.om flew thick and fast the
dreaded shafts from Ferney over Europe, striking
down the titled, the gifted, and the mighty, smiting
alike monarch and mistress, scholar and soldier, poet
and priest.
Art was minister to unbelief.  Its ideas were
bodied in the marble and glowed on the canvas or
breathed in music.
Poetry sang of it. It insinuated itself through the
charm of imagination and measure, from the epic
march of the Ienriade and the epigrammatic sneer
of the drama, to the ballad-monger of the Revolution.
History was its vehicle. Through numerous
writers on the continent, as well as Hume and Gibbon in England, "sapping a solemn creed with a
solemn sneer,"' it held the colored glass of infidelity
between the eye of Europe and the most interesting
personages and periods in human story.
Eloquence was infidel; as in the iEolus-cave of
National Convention, it stormed against monarchs,
hierarchs, human tyrannies and even the throne of
2




26             THE SKEPTICAL.ERA:
the Highest, challenging and arraigning all; impleading at the bar of a wrathful age, all the abuses
of the past, the crimes of a lying faith, and of a
despotic Church and State, and alas, with these,
Christianity and Civilization itself, for sentence and
execution.
Thus the pestilence of infidelity had struck through
the world's universal thought. It flowed in the
lucid charm of PMontaigne, it pointed an envenomed
article in the Dictionary of Philosophy, it breathed
its spirit into. Montesqnuieu's Spirit of the ~Laws, it
struck its coloring through Universal Science in the
Encyclopaedia. It sparkled in epigrammatic impieties in the theatres of Paris, Vienna and Petersburg;
it looked forth from the picture galleries of Versailles
and Potsdam. It breathed through the seductive
profanities of Helvetins, it glittered in the beautiful
sophisms of the Social Contract and in the tears of
the Letters from the Mountains. It spread its charm
through the Theophilanthropic dreams of MIarmontel
or the sensual pictures of Le Clos. It travelled and
meditated with Volney'mid ancient ruins; it shed
its false light over Gibbon's magnificent pageant of
a past world, from the moonlight solitudes of the
mouldering Coliseum.
Nor did the skepticism of the eighteenth century
confine itself to writers and thinkers. Power, place,




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.           27
the mode had become infidel; monarch and courtier, statesman and general, priest and prelate
sported their infidelity in the salons of Paris; Berlin,
Vienna  and  Petersburg.   Catharine of Russia,
Joseph of Austria, Frederick of Prussia, as well as
the most powerful and brilliant figures of the French
Court, were enthusiastic disciples and propagandists
of the new philosophy. Frederick and Catharine
were constant and admiring correspondents of Voltaire, D'Alenmbert and Diderot, and were wont to
close their letters with the sobriquet " crush the
wretch " applied to Christianity, and especially to the
French Church. Frederick furnished Voltaire an
ample establishment at Berlin, and was ever ambitious of having a coterie of infidel literati around
him. Indeed Frederick and Voltaire may be taken
as representative types of the era in its crimes, its
meanness and impiety, as well as in its order of.
heroism and genius. Catharine in her last days saw
her error-or at least its aspect of attack on despotic
order in Europ, —and grieved lest in consequence of
her encouragement of French philosophy, she might
be arraigned in history as the cause of the Revolution.
Graver crimes, which overlaid this with crimson,
might have relieved her of her fears. Still, to some
extent undoubtedly, she withher fellow despots of that
age, would have to plead guilty even to that charge.




28            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
But it is instructive and worthy of remark how
little aware were the potentates of that period of what
they were doing; how unconsciously they admired,
caressed and fawned on their deadliest foe. They
played and toyed with the tiger-kitten, and admired
its sleek grace and velvety paw, and feline caprices,
till at once it stood before them a full-grown monster
whose scream for blood sent shuddering and paleness
through the Palace of Royalty and the Chamber of
Pleasure.
Nor had infidelity meanwhile simply taken possession of the high places of Literature and Courts.
From  the learned and the noble it had spread
through the mqacsses. It had taken from the oppressed millions, their chief solace for suffering and their
chief aid to virtue, their belief in God and immortality.  Henceforth they had no friend above, no
judge, no vindicator on high. This life of woes and
shams and shames was their all. It is no wonder they
turned in the madness of revenge and of desperate
pleasure-seeking, on their oppressors and all old
order. An awful responsibility rests somewhere for
the frightful wrongs wrought to the millions of that
era, in the destruction of their religious faith; and
terrible was the hour of retribution which could not
fail to come.
How frightfully diffused was not only a disbelief




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.          29
of religion, but a savage hate, a rage even against
Christianity, the insurrections, of nations at the time
of the French Revolution not only against monarchy,
but Christianity, wreaking their fanatical atrocities
not only against the Church, but' against all that was
called God, furnish terrible proofs.  This indeed
forms one of the most melancholy and fearful of the
features of the infidelity of that period-the fact,
that unbelief became a fancticeisn  ca.passioq of
Kcared and fTbry agcaiynl  C Uistianity. It is a feature
full of significance, one demailding investigation, and
which will throw light upon the question of the
cause of the infidelity of the age. Wae are arrested
by this feature.  We pause over it in wonder and
sorrow. Why that sentiment of the stricken, blind,
haggard millions-that. sentiment of unbelief changing to a flaming rage against the great champion of
the poor and the oppressed —Jesus Christ?  What
must have been the aspect of that Christ exhibited
by that body that professed to be his representative
among men-the church-to draw upon such a character the storming phrenzy of nations?  This is a
question we have to consider, and we shall be led to
inquire in whose skirts is the blood of this mighty
guilt. What hand was it that held up a travestied,
deformed Christ before the millions?  Among the
millions of what nominal communion, under what




30             THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
ecclesiastic banner, in the domain of what church,
did this strange madness break out?  But of this,
more hereafter.  It suffices our present aim  of
sketching with general feature and coloring the phenomenon we investigate, to note that for some cause,
as we near the close of the eighteenth century, this
melancholy and malignant aspect of unbelief strikes
us portentously everywhere.   Doubt has become
wrath. The cold plague has changed to phrenzy
and fever.  Unbelief has itself become a religion,
armed with fanaticism and rage. As we look out on
the nations 6f central Europe the view seems friglitful. There is a strange agitation of peoples insurgent against Heaven; a tumultuous I"noise of the
kingdoms of nations mustering to the battle againsit
the Most High and His anointed."  In the perspective of that age, we seem looking out on a landscape
stretching under the cope of eternal night; where
the armies of evil are battling' against a sky dark and
thunderous with wrath. We have before us M3ilton's
terrible picture of the impious rage of the fallen
millions of eternal night and woe-that revel of
infinite rage and infinite despair, wherein
"Outflew
"Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty cherubim: the sudden blaze
Far round illumined Hell; highly they raged




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.           31
Against the highest, and fierce with grasped arms,
Clashed on their sounding shields the din of war,
Hurling defiance at the vault of Heaven."
The catastrophe of European states and society
well-nigh subverting modern civilization itself, that
closes the eighteenth century, does not surprise us.
As we follow along the history of.governments and
of the human mind during.the previous age, we
expect it; we feel it is inevitable; we wait the bolt;
we almost long for it-the bolt that is to beat down
the insurgent impiety of nations, that is to punish
the masters and teachers of mankind for their long
abused trust, to avenge ages of wrong to humanity,
and to vindicate the violated majesty of Heaven.
Church and monarchy in Europe, had for centuries
been running'up a fearful account with God and
man. We wait the bolt in awe and fear, but in
assurance it will cbme, and when it falls we seem to
hear the exult of the apocalypse, "We give Thee
thanks, 0 Lord God Almighty, who wast, and art,
and art to come, because Thou hast taken to Thyself
Thy great power and hast reigned; and the nations
were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of
the dead that they should be judged, and that Tlhou
shouldst destroy them that destroy the earth."
Such was the prevalence and such some of the
characteristics of the infidelity of the eighteenth cen



32            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
tury.  If we were to attempt more specifically to
characterize it, we should say its spirit was more
essentially and intensely anti-social than anti-Christian-its fight more with facts than theories; more
with the order of the world than even with its creed.
Its skepticism was social, ecclesiastical and poit ical
even more than religious.  Its primary impulse and
passion were against Institutions. These more than
dogmas-organisms more than principles, provoked,
exasperated and oppressed it.  Christianity was
odious as the religion of church, state and society,
even more than as the ordinance and revelation of
God. Church, state and society, it hated as vast and
oppressive facts.  It hated God as their supposed
guarantor.  Its war was not on them for God's
overthrow, but on iim as their champion. Though
beginning in the theoretic and speculative, and
entrenching and arming itself with the new philosophy, it grew to its terrible passion and power less as
a dialectic, than a social birth, and was engaged
more with economies than theologies. It was an
insurrection of nations less against Christianitywhich indeed had been veiled and caricatured to
them-than against a spiritual power, calling itself
of Christ, wrought through all the order of the world,
and conservating and eternizing the most stupendous
wrongs, lies and shames. It was on monstrous social




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.           33
and ecclesiastical disorders and corruptions it fed, in
order to grow to its portentous strength and stature.
It was these, far more than philosophic theses, that
gave to it its passion and force.
This union of social with speculative skepticism
will also account for man.y of the apparent contradictions. It was owing to this that it passed from
disporting itself with the speculative and the
abstract to a frantic war on the actual-that the jest
and amusement of philosophers and the badinage
and bon-mots of the savans, became the rage of the
millions. It was because of the abuse of Christianity to the political- and spiritual oppression of
nations, that religious skepticism steps forth from a
coterie of the salon to the field of arms, and from a
controversy with scholastic subtleties grows to mortal combat with monarchy and hierarchy, and with
society itself. Thus also beginning with theophilanthropic platitudes, it ends in blasphemies; with
professions of fraternity it snares to massacre, and in
the name of liberty and equality it erects the most
terrific tyranny the earth ever saw.
With a prelusive cant of moralities, it sinks into
the grossest sensualism and the vilest profligacy;
the epigram and moral tableau give place to guillotines and bayonets; the carnival of the philanthropist changes to the  carnage of fratricides; the
*                   4N~~~~2




34            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
Tencins, and Deffands, and the Rojands are succeeded by the Dames des IHalles; and the " blanches 8 uits" and Pagan orgies of the Regent are
changed to the Jacobin club, the National Assembly,
the conciergerie, and the tribunal of terror.
The origin and focus, the chief prevalence and
the climacteric of this moral plague, were in the
countries of the Romish communion, and in that
country especially where despotism, spiritual and
political, if not most absolute and complete, was at
least most keenly felt, because it came in collision
with the most advanced civilization, and the most
stimulated and enlightened mind in Catholic Europe
-France. It was in a country, where, in consequence, the atrocities, absurdities, and scandals of
power, ecclesiastic and political, were most vividly
appreciated and resented, that the plague first broke
out.
It was at a period, too, in the history of that country when despotism was most gffensive and irritating,
because the sceptre of absolutism had passed from
the mightiest and most brilliant of despots, to the
hands of the most imbecile.  The profligacy of
hierarchy and monarchy provoked the bitterer as
well as bolder hate, because impotency was now
associated with arrogance.
It was a country, too, where through the alliance




ITS CHARACTER AND EXTENT.        3'5
of spiritual and political despotisms, a nominal
Christi'anity had been made an accomplice of the
unspeakable cruelties, and profligacies, and scandals
of the hierarchy and monarchy for a thousand years,
and which presented a history, which, if not the
foulest and bloodiest in Europe, was the most so of
all that had left to the nations, amid whom they had
been enacted, life enough to perceive and resent
them. The French Church was most offensive to the
French mind, not because one was worst, or the
other best, in Europe, so much as because in France
there was exhibited a combination the highest
possible of scandals and atrocities in one, with a
subsisting vitality in the other.




36              THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
CHAtPTER II.
CAUSES OF THIE INFIDELITY OF THE EIGHTEENTH
CEN'TURY.
A century and a half precedent of Religious Passion and War;
Relaxation, Exhaustion, and Reaction consequerit-Position of the
Religious Liberties of Nations at its close-Dethronement of the
Religious Idea-Causes and Consequences-Religious-Wars-Who
was responsible for them and their Mischiefs to Faith-Aspect of
the World at the opening of the Skeptical Era melancholy and
portentous-Its Lessons.
SUCH was the great " Eclipse of Faith " in modern
history.  What was the cause, or what were. the
causes of this portentous phenomenon?  Where lies
the terrible responsibility?   Is it with Protestantism a  The cant of a certain school charges it there
-a cant so often repeated that we suppose it has
come to stand in the eyes of its utterers as an established historic fact; though, as far as we are aware,
from the beginning hitherto, it has been mere
allegation without proofs.  It is contradicted not
only by the philosophy of the case, drawing conclusions from the essential principles and tendencies of
Protestantism, but moreover by the most patent
facts, viz.: the origin, early foci, and the geographic




ITS CAUSES.               37
theatre of the plague, as also by the ecclesiastic
relations of nations amid whom it raged earliest,
longest, and most violently, and where its deadly
consequences continue most abundant this hour.
These certainly do not point to Protestantism.
We do not, therefore,.rush immediately to the
opposite conclusion, that its cause was Romanism.
Association is not necessarily causation.  Nor is
simplicity of cause to be expected of a phenomenon
so vast, complex, and multiform.-  Its cause or
causes will not probably be found exclusively with
any one church, school, or country. The cause of
causes, looming up in goblin hideousness, pre-eminent we believe, will appear to have been spiritual
despotism, But this cause is Protean and cosmopolite. It has other capitals besides the Eternal City,
and will produce its natural evil fruit, wherever
found. The church also is armed with political
power and State establishments, in other than
Catholic countries; and this alliance will produce its
disastrous consequences in Prussia and England as
well as in Austria and France. Many minor causes
we shall expect to find conspiring to the result. Of
these in. our present brief inquiry, we shall attempt
an analysis only of those most prominent and of
most significance for our times.
And first among these, I advert to a cause that




38            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
like a malignant atmosphere embraces and stimulates
to abnormal viciousness -and energy all others,
nourishing all morbid growths; sinking the vital
power, and giving an epidemic virulence to all the
moral distemperatures of the times; I refer to a
general condition of the- European mind. It was a
period of atony and exhaustion in the moral constitution of society; one of those times of relaxed and
feeble tone, in which diseases and cancerous growths
naturally set in.
What may be fitly termed the Skeptical Era in
modern history opens with reaction against one
hundred and fifty years of exalted religious sentiment, passion, and agonism. It was the collapse
after four generations of religious wars-the low
stage following the fever. It borders immediately
on the great heroic and martyr era of modern
history; an era colossal in its ideas and its passions,
its virtues and its crimes; often blinded and misguided, yet ever intensely sincere and severe, and
great even in its errors; whose faith now mounted
to enthusiasm and vision, now sunk to a lurid
and fiery fanaticism, but was ever a real and living
faith;-whose seriousness not seldom hardened to
austerity, and whose solemnity at times deepened
to gloom; but, there was heroism in its austerity and
a grandeur in its gloom. It had seemed as if the




ITS CAUSES.                39
human theatre, solemn with vaster than earthly
figures and mundane interests, were lifted amid the
awful light and shade of another world-a light and
shade streaming across it like the unearthly glare or
gloom in a landscape of Salvator, thrown across the
earth from masses of black and broken thunder-cloud
floating in a fiery ether. The tremendous drama
enacted, with its titanic personce, its vast forms of
Empire, its stupendous destinies, its mighty actors,
its Charles V., Francis II., Elizabeth, Philip II., the
Duke of Orange, Ferdinand II., Wallenstein, Luther,
Loyola and the like, grouped in a battle whose question compassed the fiery deep and the sapphire
throne-such scenes and interests passing before
them had, for almost a century and a half, kept the
religious sentiment of the world to the tone of tragic
passion, almost of agony. But to a cycle of such
preternatural exaltation and tension, relaxation and
subsidence were inevitable.  Accordingly, immediately succeeding it, we enter an era of reactionary
and divergent movement in the world's mind. Like
Milton's Satan emerging from  hell-gates, historf
leaves the hot and lurid air of fanatic passion, to
sink ten thousand fathoms deep at once in chill
mephitic damp and vapor.
By that law  of action and reaction exhibited
through all history, the world's mind now oscillates




40            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
from intense earnestness and excitement to a frivolous
apathy, a flippant and sneering indifference. Austerity had relaxed into dissoluteness, heroism had
dissolved into a fastidious sybaritism. The tragedy
had had its catastrophe, the comedy and the farce
now enter. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean,
and from the Vistula to the Atlantic, in the court
and throughout the realms of the Stuarts and the
Bourbons, the HI-ohenzollerns, the IHapsburgs and
the Romanoffs, there seemed a transition from the
Sampson Agonistes to the Comus. It was the revel
of Circe after the battle of the Gods. The spirit of
the Age was most unheroic, egotistical and godless.
In the atmosphere of such a period skepticism could
not fail to have rapid growth and diffusion. Every
cause tending to produce it must have been stimulated to peculiar malignancy and power.
But not simply through the moral atony and
collapse which followed it, was the great religious
agonism  of the world during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the cause of the infidelity of
the period subsequent. Its woes had bred disgust;
its crimes had produced revulsion; its inconsistencies provoked incredulity, and its fanaticism, abhorrence. Its atrocities and fatuities in the name of
God and Religion had tended to make both a jest or
a horror to the millions; and finally its issue being




ITS CAUSES.                41
a drawn battle, establishing among the nations toleration from  necessity, legitimating per force as
between the European family of States, a dissent that
was regarded as treason against Heaven, had begotten indifference from very impotency and despair.
But on the other hand, while establishing as between
nations.tolerance from impotence, within/ nations the
issue of that great struggle exhibits spiritual despotism in the form most. adapted to breed incredulity
and hate, viz. denuded of the defences of logic or
sentiment and stripped of the prestige of universality,
the associate of petty or'local tyrannies, and upheld
by mere mercenary military force. No wonder the
logic of standing armies startled rather than tranquillized the faith of mankind, nor that mankind began
to suspect that was hardly a kingdom of Truth that
was upborne by a million of bayonets.
The great convulsion of the Reformation, which
from the reign of Charles V. to the close of the Thirty
Years War presents the religious idea as dominant in
the politics of Europe, controlling its cabinets, agitating and swaying its millions and dashing nations
together in the shock of arms, exhibits at its close
neither of the great religious parties victorious, but
each acquiescing of necessity in the existence and
national independency of the other.. The bloody gulf
that had swallowed thirty millions of the human race




42            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
is at last closed by the treaty of Westphalia. This
political and religious, settlement of Europe, leaves
its nations in an armed truce. Vast military monarchies now appear on the map of Chri'stendoim, and
these everywhere associated with state churches.
The broken autocracy of the papacy crystallizes into
natipnal hierarchies. The fallen sceptre of the pontificate is grasped by the hand of primate or monarch. Nations are ecclesiastically independent of
each other; but the millions crushed down under
the double despotism of monarch and prelate, are
kept down by mercenary myriads of bayonets. To
them the religious independence of nations only
aggravates and exasperates the sense of spiritual
oppression.
Many causes now conspire to make the religious
idea descend from  its sovereignty over European
history; That of wealth and of military aggrandizement now for one hundred and fifty years rise to the
ascendency in the cabinet politics of Europe. Speculative thought meanwhile'descends from the surface of affairs to mine for ages in the deeps below
society, and under all the visible order of the world;
or it subtilizes and soars away to the fields in the
upper Ether, in the dim and- distant regions of
abstract to brew aloof from the present, storms for
the future; there to weave and plight and paint




.ITS CAUSES.               43
those shifting phantasms of glittering haze and fiery
vapor that shall descend on the coming time in the
thunder-cloud and the tempest.
The causes of the dethronement of the religious
idea from European history were various. Some of
them as shedding light on the era and the question
we investigate, we will note in passing.
And, First. The exhaustion, in the long agonism of
society, of the passions and sentiments which made
the religious idea sovereign and absolute. The limiting law  of all intense excitement had obtained.
The preternatural tension could not last for ever.
The fever was spent, the fire had burned itself out.,
A  reaction towards religious indifference and towards other interests and passions, was natural.
Second. The utter hopelessness of the strife which
the rule of the religious Idea in politics necessitated.
Universal ecclesiastical victory and empire were
evidently impossible for either of the combatants.
The struggle had of itself created mighty Protestant
states. Prussia and the Netherlands had sprung forth
full-armed at their birth, to battle and to victory.
And must the fight now hopeless, be eternal? Evidently then another idea must take possession of the
politics of the world; and that of religion, like all
dethroned monarchs, could pass from  sovereignty
only to insignificance and contempt, or to imprisonment, exile or execution.




44-           THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
ihird. Another cause was the severance for the
time of the Papacy, from the council chamber of
European politics. She had refused her accession to
the treaty of Westphalia, because of the secularization of Prussia guarrantied by that settlement of
Europe. Of course she could arrogate no tutelage
or guardianship of an adjustment of Christendom
against which she protested, and which she persisted
to ignore. She was necessarily without influence in
a system to which she refused to be a party. Hier
protest thus isolated her among the nations and
reduced her for the'time to political insignificancy
and impotence. But it was her arrogation of leadership in European politics, and her ambition, chiefly,
that had given the ascendency to the politico-religious idea in Europe. The agonism of nations was
antagonism against her usurpation. Zeal, often the
product of danger, passes often with it.
FoUzrt. Compulsory endurance of dissent for a
century and a half had abated the horror with
which it was regarded at first, and begot a species
of tolerance of it. No fire from heaven, and no
strange curse overtook those whose creed was supposed to make them hated of God and cursed for
both worlds. Men learned tolerance from familiarity and from the apparent tolerance of heaven.
But with the ignorant and superstitious, intolerance
is wont to be exchanged only for indifference, and




ITS CAUSES,                45
bigotry, for irreligion. There were other causes in
particular countries, which we may not here notice
particularly: e. g., in England there was reaction
against Puritan austerity, and the fanaticism of religious arms. The restoration of the Stuarts, with its
dissoluteness and pusillanimity, had succeeded to the
iron Protectorate, the stern grandeur of the Commonwealth and the martyr age of the First Charles;
and subsequently the persiflage and libertinism of
Queen Anne's court followed, with a brief interval
only of more heroic temper, at the accession of Williamn of Orange.
France exhibited the relaxation consequent on the
long convulsion of her religious and civil wars.
The revel aid intrigue of the oriental seraglio had
succeeded to the heroic age of Henry IV. and
Coligny. The stake, the dagger of the assassin, and
royal perjury had done their work. The IHuguenots
were sleeping in bloody graves, or had borne their
wrongs and hatred to foreign climes. The national
mind fell back into languor, frivolity, and indifference.
In Spain and Italy there was no longer the
earnestness of a struggle against Protestantism. The
Inquisition had done its work. From the Alps and
the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean all was silent.
Free thought was smothered in blood.  Security,




46             THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
relaxation, corruption, and national decay were
following.
Germany was prostrate, bleeding from the thirty
years war: her youth consumed; whole climes desosolate, and becoming again haunts of wild beasts.
The bones of her most gifted and heroic sons strew
the fatal battle-field from the Baltic to the Rhine,
the Alps and the Danube, and her very civilization
is beaten back half a century.  Exhaustion and
the low stage have su'cceeded to the fever. - Moreover, throughout Europe generally, the mercantile
and  economical interest, of nations, which now
becomes an ascendant one, requires new political
combinations irrespective of religious predilections
and affinities: e. g., the combinations around Louis
XIV. were independent of the question of religious
schools. Each religious sect and party, Greek, Latin,
Papal, Protestant, Turk, or Frank, are grouped in
shifting confederation irrespective of ecclesiastical
affinities.
From all these causes a new spirit comes to the
helm of -affairs. The clangor of religious arms that
has resounded through a terrible century, ceases.
The storm  of war that had wandered like a fury
through every country of Europe from the British
Isles to the Adriatic, is at length laid. The nations
no more slay each other in the name of the God of




ITS CAUSES.               47
Peace. B3ut the curses of that strife still linger, not
only in the desolation of the fairest portions of
Europe, its sacked cities, wasted realms, ruined culture, and demoralized civilization; not only in the
natural subsidence of the mind of nations into religious indifference from  both the exhaustion and
hopelessness of their effort at religious empire; but
in disgust with religion itself, as connecting itself
with the peculiar atrocities and cruelties, the fanaticisms and hypocrisies of the religious wars.
All wars are demoralizing; but the religious are
most corrupting of all wars. They are of all, most
ruthless or cruel: you pursue your enemy in them,
not merely as your foe, but as a miscreant accursed
of heaven. Why should you show mercy where
your creed tells you God himself shows none? You
outlaw him  from human sympathy, and drive him
from the number of men. HIe already-ranks to you
with the infernals. The personal enemy now is
exalted to an' avenger of heaven. Private revenge,
cupidity, and ambition, become consecrated as a
zeal for God. You avenge your own braved intolerance and wounded pride as insults to the Divine
Majesty. There is, therefore, in such wars the least
of moderation or mercy. Conscience lays down its
watch; passion gluts itself without restraint, and
the lusts of hell receive the sanction of heaven. A




48            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
creed, a metaphysical formulary, perhaps, is enough
now to baptize cruelties which unsophisticated nature
regards as purely devilish. I need not stop to argue
that such wars must of themselves lead to infidelity,
when the madness of the hour is passed, if men dare
to think. First, they must breed this with manifold
other curses in the corruption they engender.
Again, what can sooner teach rejection of a creed
than to see it made the warrant for sordid lust and
horrid crimes? What sooner compel me to disbelieve in God altogether than seeing Him made the
patron of wickedness? You array my moral nature
against Him.' My immortal instincts arise and protest: "Thou, 0 God, art of purer eyes than to
behold iniquity."  No other God will they receive.
They drive me to infidelity when they make religion
to sanction revenge and cruelty.
No wonder, then, that Europe, with the page of a
century and a half of religious wars before it, read
therein a lesson of infidelity and of disgust with a
faith in whose name such horrors were perpetrated.
Nor is it a wonder, that with such antecedents, there
was in the mind of the age corruption in which
these lessons might readily take root.
All these causes tended to produce a general
reaction in the European mind towards indifference
and unbelief.  There was, therefore, a general




ITS CAUSES.               49
relaxation of Christendom consequent on its long
and intense paroxysm, a relaxation both in religious
sentiment and the general tone of society.  The
States of Europe rushed into the game of wealth.
Then were courts immersed in schemes of economy,
trade, and finance, or in oriental voluptuousness and
seraglio intrigue; and the Papacy, meanwhile,
sinking back again from the spasm of severer
morality and ecclesiastic reform to which antagonism
to Luther had scourged it, returned to its old dissoluteness of manners, its avarice, corruption, and nepotism.
To all these causes impelling Christendom to the
verge of an era of irreligion, must be added the
indifference naturally bred of the aspect of various
forms of dissent, living newly side by side in each
other's presence; just as the strictness of moral
principle in great cities is often impaired by the very
multitude and familiarity of practices violative of it,
which one is compelled to witness. He that is
newly wonted to see his faith and his principles
denied and trampled under foot of multitudes, is in
danger of losing his own reverence and belief in
regard to them.
Finally we must reckon amid causes of skepticismthe confusion of ideas inevitable on such a great
breaking up of the world's mind as the Lutheran
3




50            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
Reformation, producing "c distress of nations with
perplexity."
We refer to these causes as general ones, giving
increased virulence to other great agencies, which I
shall hereafter *notice, in plunging the world into.
infidelity.
Such were the ages precedent to the skeptical era,
such the times of its preparation and inauguration.
It was, as we have seen, a bloody cancer on a world
spent with a century and a half of Religious carnage.
It was the Pale Horse of the Apocalypse following
the Red, and IIell was in its train.
But before we leave this topic we pause and ask
who is responsible —who is rightfully arraigned at
the bar of History for these horrible religious
wars and their baleful influence on religious belief?
That power, we are compelled to answer, whose
attempted tyranny over belief caused them, provoked, compelled and perpetuated them, who would
not allow to the nations the natural rights of free
faith and free worship without them-Romne. The
ruffian that attempts to bind my hands and put out
my eyes, or to keep me down and fettered when I am
fallen, he is responsible and not I, for the blood that
may flow in my attempts to deliver and defend myself.
A power sat in Rome claiming the empire of the
world, and there could be no peace on earth until




ITS CAUSES.                51
she should be compelled to veil or at least keep in
abeyance that assumption. It took a century and a
half of war and crime, and the exhaustion of the
nations of Europe, to secure that result. Back then
of.those bloody ages —pouring forth from the gates of
the Vatican as from the ever-open gates of James of
old, the horrid plague of war on Europe —sits as
cause, the Pontifical City. For these wars, and the
woes and crimes and impiety and infidelity they
wrought, she must bear the first responsibility at the
bar of History and of God. Her theory-her principle of intolerance and assumption of the spiritual
empire of Christendom and of the right of the secular
sword-necessitated those wars. History, too, must
record that often her practice-her ambition and
intrigue, fanaticism and conspiracy against nations
and dynasties-drove the nations into them. So far,
then, as those ages of religious wars were the cause
of infidelity, not Protestantism surely but her antagonist, is primarily responsible.
Such was Rome's premninence and priority of
position in regard to this long and sanguinary struggle.  Not that she was always in each instance the
filst aggressor, nor that intolerance and persecution
attached to her alone, nor that Protestant arms were
always guiltless or unstained by atrocities. Alas!
the fury of Religious arms once admitted, the cup of




52            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
blood once tasted, none can answer for the horrors
that may ensue in the intoxication that follows.
Neither party can look back on those ages and say
I am  guiltless. Both may say, C"verily we have
thought we were doing God service in wasting
accursed nations."  We should judge men in the
light of their own age-charitably.  We should
judge principles in the light of all ages —strictly and
severely.
We have thus considered and described the fact
we are attempting to analyze-the defection of the
human mind from Christianity in the last century,
and the general condition of the world's mind when
it appeared. The era of skepticism opens with the
moral constitution of the world relaxed, and its lifepulse beating heavy and feeble. Its tone is low;
the vital principle faint. It is a time for disease to
set in. The guardian forces of the social system are
asleep. Its energies of resistance are paralyzed and
the elements of corruption are at work; a dissolution
is begun. We feel, as we enter the period in question, that we approach some melancholy catastrophe
of human society; one of those sad, chill, feeble, foul
epochs which mark the decay and death of nations
and civilizations. Its type of life and passion is
worn out, and itself in collapse. Chivalry, honor,
heroism and faith lie dying; the mean and crawling




ITS CAUSES.               53
vices —the worms of dissolution begin to appear.
The world seems old and wan. The air grows chill,
the gloom thickens. We feel we are entering the
penumbra of the ecliy2se and the occultation of the
orb of light and warmth is at hand. Thus the skepticle cycle impresses us as it enters. But there are
also in its aspect portents of change.  Society is
torpid, spent, faint. iBut we may prophesy for it,
there is fever lurking in that ague stage, and madness and delirium are couched in that atony. It is
a world where all things seem portentous. WVe
snuff the plague in that stagnant air. We feel death
in its chill and its gloom.  We feel the shadow of
the destroying angel on that sky.  We momently
wait his epiphany. That sky we feel is to kindle to
another hue.  Blood-red it rises before us, and
beneath it twenty millions of victims. We hear the
edict "these millions for the guillotine; these for
sword; for famine and pestilence and the rage of the
elements these; and these for madness and terror
and sorrow and shame."  There is a tumult of
nations raging against God.  The abyss yawns
under European civilization, and Hell from beneath
is stirred to meet the mighty, the gifted, the brave,
the beautiful, the noble, at their coming.'  "Thou
beheldcest and drove asunder the nations. —TShe dee2)
uttered his voice, and lifted up his hands on high



54            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
At the light of thi/ne arrows they went and at the
s/hining of thy glittering s8pear —So 2perish all thine
erewmies, Oh Jehovah."
13ut before the earth is ripe for that vintage, this
low tone in the world's life must pass to a paroxysm
of fanatic atheism, or at least of infidelity raging
against Christianity. We have hereafter to inquire
through what causes eminently, and in what form
that baleful epidemic of unbelief broke forth on such
an era as we have described and overspread the
earth.
But one lesson of solemn import the precursive
view we have taken of our theme, teaches us.
As we close our present survey of this melancholy
chapter of History we are awed with the sense of a
Nemesis, celestial or infernal, on the track of nations.
The night-shade of infidelity that waved over a cycle
sprang from thirty millions of graves. The crimson
carnival of revolution only alternated with and
avenged the auto-da-f6 of a world.
Would that Christendom might learn from this sad
lesson how wretched, futile and guilty is force for
the extension of religion! Whoso opens the seals of a
religious war unlocks the bottomless pit: he lets
loose a devil upon earth, whose chaining none may
foreknow.
Let us be thankful that we live in the light of a




ITS CAUSES.                 55
later period in history, and let us look at the actors
in the melancholy drama in review, often with pity
for their errors, and admiration for their heroism,
but detestation, never too strong for their principles
and their policy in the arbitrament of questions of
religions faith. And let us not forget, that in their
position, and in the light of their age, we not improbably had been equally guilty.
I was about to congratulate you that the gulf of
religious wars is closed. But I must restrain my
gratulation. I hear this very hour the clangor of
innumerable arms brandished in religious pretence,
if not in phrensy.  From the lNubian sands to the
Polar snows, from  the Caucasus to the Atlantic, I
hear the hum of nations mustering to carnage in the
name of God and religious faith, as well as of
Empire. Like a baleful meteor religious fanaticism
flames over the advancing hosts, mingling and baptizing other passions.  A  war of religion seems
again opened, and tidings from, the rising sun are
telling us the old devil is again unchained, walking
the shores of the Euxine or flapping his red wing
o'er its wave.
I restrict my gratulations.  Rather with warmer
gratitude let us thank God that we live in a country
where religious tolerance is not a right wrested from
despots with a bloody hand, but seemingly as natu.




56             THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
ral to our land as our rivers and our mountains-a
first truth, a life principe in our civilization-a
tolerance not of indifference, or unbelief, or of compromise, or suppression of principle, but a tolerance
where perfect freedom of thought and speech breaks
the edge of religious hatred, and keeps religious passions from  out-breaking violence and secret conspiracy, by furnishing them expression and scope in
a fair and open field of argument-such a field as
alone truth asks-the free lists of reason and speech.
May heaven ever keep those lists open.  The
hand, the sect, the party that in any part of these
lands shall attempt to close them —let all the people
curse it.  Historic  ages shall send down their
Amen.  Let us never fear to leave our Christian
faith in those lists with truth and God, the human
mind, and the sacred Spirit. Fiercely as may rage
the conflict, with these arbiters and champions in the
strife, a true faith need never fear. Its banner shall
float for ever in our skies. If in such a field it falls,
it will be because faith and liberty have no longer
place on the earth. But living or dying, their fate
is one. Of one birth, one cradle, one history, one
faith, and one freedom —if fall they must, they shall
fall on the same field, shrouded in the same bloody
banner, and be buried in the same grave.




ITS CAUSES.                      57
CHAPTER III.
PlEVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.
Revolution in Philosophy —A necessity of Social Progress perverted
by Spiritual Despotism to the destruction of Faith-Protestantism
a Revolutionist in Philosophy-Different Philosophic Methods
— Aristotelian-Scholastic-Baconian-Mediseval Philosophy, the
instrument of Spiritual Despotism-Aristotle and the Pope,
Joint Monarchs and High Priests of thought and faith-Revolution in Philosophy, an emancipation of mind-Its position in the
Map of Modern History-Eras of Religious, Philosophical, and
Political Revolution-Futility and fruitlessness of the Old Philosophy-A barren toil in an endless circle-A blind and fetter of
Mind-Its Overthrow a Necessity-Why it dragged Faith with it
in its Fall-Different Results in different Countries-Disasters to
Faith, the result of Spiritual Despotism-Protestantism as Revolutionist in Philosophy a mighty Benefactor-Plea of the Baconian
Philosophy.'
IN previously discussing the skepticism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have
endeavored to exhibit its wide prevalence, some of
its distinctive characteristics, and the condition of
the world in which it broke out and spread; or in
other words, the  extent, type, and  predissposing
causes, of that great moral plague.
We have now to consider a great fact in European
history, which may be termed an occasional cCause;




58            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
that is, one not in itself competent to the result, but
having such efficiency only from  the accidental
coincidence and co-operation of other causes. We
refer to the great REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY, that
inaugurated the world's transition from mediseval to
modern history —a revolution usually dated and
named from Lord Bacon, of the latter half of the
sixteenth century, although he is not so much the
author as elucidator, and instaurator of the philosophy that bears his name.
The Baconian method is older than Bacon-as old,
indeed, as mind. It began with the education of the
first human soul. But its enunciation, exposition,
and application by Lord Bacon, more especially in
the department of physics, as afterwards by Des
Cartes in metaphysics, unquestionably mark a signal
epoch in the history of philosophy; and they were
followed directly by a movement so rapid, potent,
and radical, in the thinking and scientific world,
that we term it a philosophical revolution.  This
revolution synchronizes with another great movement in the European mind-the Lutheran Reformation-to which it stands also logically related
both as cause and effect. Indeed, the Reformation
may be considered as one compartment of the vast
field-one act in the mighty drama of that philosophic revolution, that beginning with the first truths




ITS CAUSES.                59
and primal intuitions of the mind, was destined to
sweep in its scope the whole universe of life and
action.
The enemies of the emancipation of intellect and
faith, charge on the religious reform of the sixteenth
century, that it produced the religious skepticism of
the eighteenth, by adopting as its logical instrument
the new philosophical method —that it begat the
philosophical revolution, and, through it, the inifidelity associated with it.  But of that disastrous
result, it was, in truth, only the occasional cause;
having its evil efficiency to that result, only from
other causes; such as the low and feeble tone in the
moral constitution of the world, and the reaction,
exhaustion, and collapse following ages of a preternatural exaltation of the religious sentiment, and of
the phrenzy of religious arms. That revolution was
in itself beneficent and healthful and one necessary to
the world's progress; and it was productive of irreligion, only as the cool and bracing air may produce
fever in the debilitated body, or as the genial and vital
warmth may induce corruption in a corpse. But as
especially infecting it with a morbific and malignant
tendency we have to note spirittCal despotism-a
cause essentially effciewnt of the sad consequenceintrinsically, eternally, universally malignant; certain under all circumstances where it shall not




60            THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
absolutely stifle mind to syncope or death, to make
it unbelieving or misbelieving.
In pursuance, therefore, of our general theme, we
propose now to discuss this revolution in philosophy,
in its relations to the skepticism contemporary and
subsequent, and, as far as it was a cause of that phenomenon, to inquire why it was so, and who is responsible for its being so.
But first let us endeavor to give a clear idea of
what we mean by a revolution in _philosophy. No
feature of the period we are considering is more
important to be noted or rightly understood.
By a "Revolution in Philosophy" we mean a
change in our methods of investigcation or proof-a
change in the primary laws and process of reasoning
and in6 our grounds of belief.
There are two methods by which questions may
be tried or a thing examined-one, is by looking at
the thing itself, its nature, properties, elements,
causes, effects, relations. The other, is by turning
over the pages of authority; by inquiring what somebody else has said or determined on the subject.
The former method is the ANALYTIC, which proceeds by
taking things to pieces, and by examining their intrinsic qualities and relations. The latter is the DOGMATIC, which proceeds by inquiring after the dogmas
or the pronounced judgments and transmitted deci



ITS CAUSES.               61
sions of others. The latter method obtained throughout Europe in whatever claimed to be science, in the
ages before Luther and Bacon, indeed through the
mediaeval period; i. e. for more than one thousand
years.
The philosophy that arose based on this method
was called Aristotelian, not because Aristotle uses
or teaches the dogmatic method.  No philosopher
of the ancient, or, we may say, even of the modern
world, ever used the analytic or inductive mode,
more freely or more successfully than that one of the
subtlest, most comprehensive, and most analytic of
human intellects.
The medieval philosophy was called Aristotelian,
because it referred to Aristotle's teachings in logic,
rhetoric, ethics, physics, etc., as the finished authoritative Bible of human knowledge-the accomplished
possible of science —the perfected encyclopaedia of
results attainable by the human intellect.
It was called scholastic, from  the scholastics or
schoolmen; a class of dialecticians, mostly theologians and ecclesiastics, which appeared in the dark
ages, and which constructed out of Aristotle's philosophy, a logic which became the great defence of
the Papacy.  It placed indeed the Pagan, Greek
and the Latin Pontiff, as joint monarchs, on the same
philosophical throne. The Pope and Aristotle were its




62             THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
associate high priests; the dialectics of the Stagyrite
and the decretals of the Pontiff constituted the joint
supreme oracle of human thought.  Out of the
subtle analysis, divisions, definitions and classifications of the acute Greek, the schoolmen had framed
a dialectic, whose formularies were only a manual
of logical traps, nets, tricks, and snares, that snapped
you up unawares into the admission of absurdities
the most palpable; schemes of casuistic fence, of
cut, thrust, feint and parry; a system of intellectual
legerdemain, that juggled you out of belief in your
own eyes and ears, into acceptance of dogmas conflicting never so strongly with the common sense and
irresistible instinctive judgment of the mind.  It
had become a mere science of quibble, of sophistical
subtleties, of words without things, and reasoning
without knowledge of the subject matter.  This
philosophy aiding the church, had in turn been consecrated by it.  They upheld each other and were
bound together. Thus the spiritual power representing Christianity had bound this philosophy as a
chain around the mind of the world.
So it was till the sixteenth century. The revolution in philosophy was the breaking of this chainthe substitution of the analytic or inductive method
in place of the scholastic. Of this revolution Bacon
and Des Cartes are the great leaders in the realm of




ITS CAUSES.                63
philosophy; Luther in his reform, was its practical
asserter in the domain of religion. The assertion of
the right of private judgment and of the duty of the
individual Christian to prove all things, necessarily
overthrew the old philosophy and faith together.
This Baconian or Cartesian method, thus vindicated,
is to this day an abhorrence in the eyes of Romne.
The old philosophy still lingers ghostlike around her
universities, waiting the full day-break to flee. The
nations that seized on the new method and applied
it, have gone forward in power at least-power in
the world of thought, in science, reason, invention,
administrations and power over the material world,
such as presents them almost as a superior order of
beings compared with the nations which have
rejected it.
But this intellectual emancipation produced the
mingled effects which liberty must in a world like
ours.  It unquestionably became abused to license
and skepticism. In casting away Aristotle and Pope,
men unquestionably did often proceed to cast away
Jesus Christ, and in revolt against the authority of
Rome, they cast away also allegiance to Christianity
itself.
The question now is, who is responsible for this? or
rather is Protestantism, as often charged, the guilty
cause of it?  Protestantism rejects all authority in




64             THE SKEPTICAL ERA:
matters of religious faith but the word of God. Is
she responsible because some, adopting the same
philosophic method, in casting away Papal decretals
and Canon law, cast the Bible away with them?
ifacauley thus speaks of the alliance between
Aristotle's philosophy and the church, with the consequences.  "In the fifth century Christianity had
conquered Paganism, and Paganism had enfeebled
Christianity. The rites of the Parthenon passed into
the worship of the Church; the subtleties of the
academy, into her creed.  Similar trifles just as
subtle, interminable and unprofitable, occupied the
sharp intellects of the schoolmen.  At length the
time had come when the barren philosophy which
had worn so many shapes, mingled with so many
creeds, had survived empires, religions, races, languages, was destined to fall. Driven from its ancient
haunts, it had taken sanctuary in that church which
it at first had persecuted; and like the daring fiends
of the poet
" Placed its seat
Next to the seat of God,
And with its darkness durst affront His light."
WVords, mere words, nothing but words had been
the fruit of all the toil of all the most renowned sages
of sixty generations. " In an evil day," says Bacon,




ITS CAUSES.                65
"though with great pomp and solemnity, was the
ill-starred alliance stricken between the Old Philosophy and the New Faith."  Ill-starred in truth it was.
For the time was to come when it was to hang like
a vast-decayed column from the temple it was to
support, threatening to drag the whole structure
with it to the dust. It was a coat of mail, destined
to become a compress, preventing or distorting the
growth, and finally stifling life. It was an alliance
of the corruptible with the incorruptible, the mortal
with immortality, destined surely to beget misbelief
or unbelief. When one should die, as die it must, it
would seem to draw the other into the same grave
with it, as the body the soul. Disastrous consequences to Faith in Christianity itself could not fail to
ensue, when the canonized falsity should be exploded,
and the philosophy baptized as of God and consecrated as IiLs ordinance, should be exposed as a
barren mockery. But I ask, is the party that tears
away the mockery or the one that vouches for its
substantiality, responsible for those mischiefs of its
exposure?
Nothing is more common in certain quarters than
to deplore or accuse the Protestant Reformation as
the cause, through the new philosophic method, of
the infidelity of the eighteenth century and its closing Revolutionary catastrophe. It has become the




66            CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
cant of a school, not only of professed Romanists,
but of pseudo-Protestant writers; repeated so often,
that not only themselves believe it, but timid Protestants have begun often to distrust and fear their
own principles.
An investigation of the case brings home the
charge to the accusers themselves. We believe it
can be shown it was the despotism attempted by
the spiritual power over the human mind —by Rome
-that was the cause that the change in philosophizing, which was requisite to the progress of humanity,
became a ruinous revolution instead of a gradual
and conservative reform; that she necessitated such
a result by her treatment of the minds of Europe, in
the previous ages of her despotism over the West.
It was a necessity of civilization through her act.
But whether regarded or not *as a necessity of
civilization, it was at least the great social achievement of the era we are considering-a vast step in
actual progress, though bearing, it may be, through
abysses.
To aid our apprehension of the important relations
of this topic, let us look at its position on the map of
modern history.
Modern history from 1500 to the present divides
itself into three great periods, according to the ideas
that rule history during those periods, and around




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.          67
which gather their vital struggle and central interest;
viz. the periods of RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL and
POLITICAL REVOLUTIONS. Dating modern history from
1500 or the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation,
the first period extends thence to 1648 or the treaty
of Westphalia. The second, from the treaty of Westphalia (1648), to the French Revolution (1790). The
third, from the opening of the French Revolution to
the present. The great struggle of the first period
is in the religious or ecclesiastical, of the second in
the philosophical, the third in the political realm.
The great question of the first, from 1520 to 1648,
related to the sowrce, nature, and organization, of
spiritual authority accd rule; in the second (from
1648 to 1790), to the fundamental princi2ple and
philoso phical method of all knowledge and belief. In
the third (1790 to the present), to the 2political constitution and order, which should be the outward
embodiment and representative of the inward sentiments and convictions of society-the visible realization in institutioTns of the world's thought and belief.
Each of these steps or processes is as necessary to the
series in the great logic of civilization-each a segment of the same great stream, but each with its own
peculiar direction, impediments, rapids and cataracts.
The great work of the second period (1648-1790)




68           CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
that we are now considering, summed up in its beneficent results, was the emancipation of the human
mind in the realm of philosophy —the overthrow of
the Aristotelian, or more properly, the scholastic, and
the establishment of the Baconian or analytic method
in all reasoning. Or in other words, it was the legitimation in society of the inductive process and the
right of private judgment, in all belief.
Both the above methods, the dogmatic and inductive, in their sphere are legitimate-either transcending its sphere is pernicious. Where God has placed
a thing before me in my view and within my grasp,
analysis is an obvious command of reason and of
God. Where things are beyond my vision and knowledge, I must receive them on authority and testimony
if I receive them at all. And where my reason
accepts a record as from God, my reason also binds
me to accept as true what is therein stated. But it
is obviously as unphilosophic to call in theologic
authorities to settle for us, questions lying out of the
scope of revelation, and in that of mere human discovery, as, e. g., those of astronomy, or mechanics, or
chemistry, as it would be to attempt to determine
the high mysteries of the invisible world and facts
of divine government, by geometry, algebra and the
astronomic analysis; and he errs as much, who
essays to determine whether the earth is the centre




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.        69
of the universe, aLd the sun revolves around it, or
vice versa, by consulting canon law and papal bulls,
as he who should think to call down Gabriel to work
out for him a problem in trigonometry. I have no
more right to ask God to do for me what He has
given me power to do for myself, than I have to
reject statements He has graciously been pleased to
make of truths infinitely and for ever above my
mortal ken.
But in the sixteenth century, the philosophy of
authority had far transcended its legitimate bounds
and grasped in its prerogative all departments of
human knowledge.  In the name of an infallible
authority imparted of Heaven, the Church had
applied the clamps and meshes of a subtle scholasticism, calling itself of Aristotle, to all science; had
usurped the prerogative of all truth, and put the
universal human mind under censorship: a man
might be burned as readily for a thesis in astronomy, as in theology; for the heresy of the Copernican system, as for a denial of transubstantiation.
Authority was called in-to settle everything. Aristotle's categories and dialectics wedded to Papal
prerogative —these formed a prison closure round
the world, beyond which reason or inquiry became
not only absurd, but impious.
"Looking at the philosophy of modern times,"




70           CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
says Morell in his History of Philosophy,'in connection with that which for nearly two thousand
years had preceded it, we see it bearing the marks
of an independence, which since the days of Plato
and Aristotle had been altogether unknown. The
scholastic ages in particular were marked by a wellnigh slavish deference to authority-an authority
which was balanced with some degree of equality
between Aristotle on the one hand, and the Pope on
the other. Philosophy during this period was content not only to be held in leading-strings, but to be
nurtured and instructed by dogmatic theology as an
obedient child, by its parent or guardian. It was
timid in all its movements, feeble in its effects, and
felt so much need of extraneous support that it willingly sanctioned an appeal to those who, the one in
the ancient, the other in the modern world, had
succeeded in gaining the confidence and subduing
the reason of mankind."
"The Reformation was a revolt against authority,
and presented the spectacle of the human reason
once more asserting its independence, and indignantly
bursting the chains by which it had so long been
bound; for whether we regard the movement which
then took place, in the religious, the political, or
philosophical world, they are alike characterized by
the same determination to shake off the trammels of




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.       71
servitude to which the will of humanity had for many
past ages submitted.  It was in the sixteenth century (the Reformation) that authorities which had
been long doubted were openly disavowed, that the
first overthrow of intellectual and spiritual despotism
was given and received."
This great achievement of the Reformation was
not only due to the free genius which pervaded it, but
to its ecclesiastic revolt from the Pope —one of the
great masters or authorities to which scholasticism
professed allegiance-and especially to its bringing
its appeal to the private judgment of all men, with
the open Bible in hand, presenting its warrant for
universal intellectual liberty in the command given
not to Apostles and Popes, but the Christian Brotherhood, "prove all things, hold fast that which is
good."
A Revolution  in Phiosophy woas a necessity of
European Civilization.-Society could not advance
without it. The old organum-as the dialectic of
the old philosophic school was termed-had become
a mere fetter to humanity; inadequate to discover
a new truth or to defend an old one, but simply to
entangle and enchain mind-a mere idle, barren
gymnastic, wearying minds with ceaseless gyrations
and cunning rnanceuvre and evolution, but advancing
never a step.




72            CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
Nothing is more vital to society than a true philosophic method or primary law and process of
belief. Nothing could be more fatal to real progress
than the old method. It was futile, fruitless toil in
endless circle. It was rolling the ever-rebounding
stone of Sisyphus or pouring water in the bottomless
urns of the Danaides. Was a proposition in physics
or metaphysics to be determined? The school-men
sent you not to analyze the thing, but they coerced it
into the categories and syllabus of the subtle Greek;
they put it into the strait-waistcoat of some dialectic
formula; they put it upon the rack and torture of
syllogism and enthymeme, and finally bound it down
and smothered it by the decrees of Councils and the
bulls of Popes. Was the inquirer still unsatisfied 2
The ponderous names of a Duns Scotus, a Thomas
Aquinas, or some Seraphic Doctor, or some Gregory
or Innocent or ]Boniface, were made to thunder about
his ears with the technical barbarisms of a scholastic
jargon, till overwhelmed and confounded, if not convinced, he was glad to be silent, especially as those
barbarisms were no mere brutafulmina, but behind
them  was brandished before his eyes the ultima
ratio of spiritual despots-the mightier logic of imprisonment, wheel and fagot.
Ages of such processes manifestly led to nothingcertainly to no discovery or progress; The utterance




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.        73
of millions under force or fear could prove nothing,
discover nothing.  Indeed discovery and progress
were not the aim of these processes. They were
rather devices to keep down revolt against the intellectual duarchs that ruled the world. The whole aim
was to keep all things fast bound where they were.
Again the talismanic secret of the old Logic-its
wondrous power in the eyes of its professors was in
itsforms —forms which could dispense with the substance of things and with real knowledge, and were
in themselves a universcd solvent for all questions,
even of things themselves tunknown-forms so wonderful, that you could sit down in your study, and
without telescope or celestial observation, cypher
out the essences of the stars or the problems of the
moon's life. The adept had arrived at such wonderful sleight of logical technic and formulary, that independent of all prior examination or knowledge, he
could extort the truth out of any question, no matter
how novel or mysterious, how occult, awful or fanciful. He could tell you with equal facility the population of Saturn, the number of feathers on the wing
of the cherubim, and how many angels could stand
on the point of a needle. Armed with these and in
his own list, your true scholastic athlete was no common antagonist. He would snap up the wariest in
his syllogistic gin; floor the doughtiest with some
4




74            CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
nimble fetch. Now he would distract vonu with his
quick and subtle practice; now dazzle you with some
glittering tenuous sophism; until he could thrust the
blade of some keen technic through the joints of
your harness. Now, Aristotle failing him, he would
gore you unaware with some pontific bull; now
brain you outright with some ecclesiastical canon.
And if all this would not finish an adversary, then
try the illumination of fire! burn him! or the wheel
and scourge may awaken his logical consciousness,
or at least the dungeon with its darkness and solitude
and fastings, may ensure him sober and clear-brained
leisure for reflecting on the arguments resisted. Indeed often the theologue and schoolman of the middle ages was in the logical lists an antagonist as
formidable as was Nero in the Roman Circus, with
the Pretorian Guard to back him, to the unhappy
contestant for the honors of the fiddle.
Now the end of centuries of labor and conflict of
this kind could only be words, words, words; mere
words, save that their filmy and glittering maze was
a blind and mesh to the mind of the world. Intellectual bewilderment, enslavement and stagnation
could only ensue. Society could no more advance
than Bulwer's man that thought to travel by endlessly gyrating on one leg. Progress by the old
logic was, as if one were to attempt to go to New




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.        l[5
York from St. Louis, by the way of the Mammoth
Cave.- Wind about as much as you would through
dark or glittering labyrinth, over flood and cliff and
through fairy grots or dim mysterious avenues, toil
as you might over rough or smooth and steeps
ascending or descending, you were certain at last to
return on yourself and emerge where' youl started,
near Green River.
A new direction for the intellect was needed; a
change of fundamental principles and primal method
in the investigation of truth or quest of knowledge,
another " orygcnumb" or new instrument of reasoning.
This was a primal want of society-the first step
towards all sure and permanent progress.  I must
be assured my method of reasoning is right, or I may
weary myself for ever without discovering a principle
or ascertaining a fact.  Society had for ages thus
labored, adding not a single science and hardly a new
art or even a new truth, for two thousand years.
The trouble was not the want of genius or labor, but
the method was vicious. A man will never climb
Mont IBlanc by working a treadmill, work he ever
so vigorously. The world has wasted its strength in
ever " revolving questions" as Macaulay calls them,
on controversies ever recurring again, such as
whether pain is an evil? whether all things are
fated? whether we can be certain of anything?




76            CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
whether we can be certain that we are certain of
nothing, &c.  Philosophy was battling over these
questions in the age of Luther, as in the age of
Socrates, and still no nearer the end of the treadmill.
An endless round of sonorous nothings, technical
barbarisms, casuistical subtleties, resounded in the
ears of society as it plodded its weary way over
"many a frozen, many a fiery Alp," mid rivers of
inky blackness, or eddying flame and phantom
peopled wildernesses, in endless mazes wandering;
emulating in its bootless and ceaseless toil the fabled
children of eternal night; till at last emerging from
its dark sojourn, lo it finds itself just where it started
weary centuries ago.
An emancipation of society from  a Philosophy
that thus imprisoned it, was obviously a necessity of
progress.  Its achievement from some source, was
we think a certainty, as well as necessity of the ages,
had there been no Bacon, no Des Cartes, no Luther.
We might then leave the charge against Protestantism, of causing infidelity through the philosophic
method she vindicated and inaugurated, with the
simple statement that in this she was only the occasioning. cause of a philosophic revolution, necessary
and sure to come in soume way, because the life of
society required it. But we do not choose to leave
it there. Rather we accept the charge as a panegy



REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.         77
ric, rather we proudly claim, to her immortal honor,
the glory of the intellectual emancipation of mankind,
even with all the evils incident thereto.
But of this, more hereafter. We admit that Protestantism was an occasion, the great occasion, if you
please, of the revolution in philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; a revolution, nevertheless, which, as a necessity of European civilization
and progress, was sure from some cause to occur.
The question still remains, what made a revolution
thus necessary and inevitable, so disastrous to religious faith? What had so abused the name of religion before the nations, that the emancipation of
thought must be an insurrection against God? had
so abused the human reason, that it could not separate spiritual enslavement from submission to the
authority of Heaven? and could see no pathway for
society between drivelling superstition and blasphemous rejection of all religion? What power had
made the darkness of its dungeon so dark, and for
such ages, that when its prison-walls were broken,
its victims became blinded by the very light? What
power had so inwrought a sophistical and illusive
philosophy with Christian truth, in the mind of the
world, that you could not tear away that philosophy,
without dragging down with it in ruins the temple
of God? Who had so identified Christianity with




78            CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
the sterile system of the schoolmen, that the nations
must remain in hopeless feebleness and puerility, or,
as of old, become inventors only by becoming like
the children of Cain?  Ceirtainly, beyond all other
powers in Europe, she was responsible for this, who
for one thousand years had claimed to be intellectual
and spiritual lord of mankind.
I have said Protestantism was the occasion of that
philosophic revolution. It was so, inasmuch as it
stirred the intellectual deeps of Europe, and as it
summoned mankind in insurrection against a spiritual despotism  that had indissolubly bound up its
authority with that of the scholastic philosophy, so
that both must stand or fall together.
It was also obliged, in vindication of itself against
spiritual despotism, to adopt, assert, and vindicate
the new philosophy. It became, therefore, a great
champion and monument of the ]Baconian method.
So far, and no further, does it stand related as a
cause, through it, to the infidelity of the sixteenth
century.
It is not to be denied that the intellect of Europe,
when emancipated, ran often into wild, eccentric,
and ruinous ways. It would have been strange, had
it not done.so. The license of the emancipated is
commonly in proportion to the severity of the despotism they have endured.  This is ever one of the




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.          79
bitterest curses of despotism;, and one that most
unequivocally demonstrates its intrinsic and irremediable mischievousness. The atrocities and extravagances of liberty being thus the most damning accusation of the precedent' despotism, how vehemently do
those of the mind of Europe, after the emancipation
of the Reformation, arraign the spiritual tyranny of
previous ages! The infidelity of Protestant freedom,
if a proved fact, would be the great opprobrium of the
present Catholic despotism. But it is not so much
the infidelity of Protestant freedom, as the indignant
insurrection of mind in Catholic Europe against
Christianity, that presents the darkest picture of the
age we are considering.
It results from the necessary tendency of all transition periods also, that, in such an intellectual break-up
of the world as that of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, abnormal and irregular manifestations of
every kind were likely to appear. It is difficult for
the human mind to stop in revolutions. When it
begins to cast its false creeds and false gods overboard, it is apt also to throw away the true. This
danger is incident to the abandonment of any antiquated and venerated error; of course, to all reform
and all progress. The safety with which this danger
is passed, depends on the fidelity with which the
spiritual and intellectual instructors cand guardians




80             CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
of a people have previously discharged their trust.
There is what Miorell calls " the skepticism of ignorance:" that is, the unbelief of a people, who, having
their faith and veneration for a corrupt church and
spurious Christianity destroyed, and having no knowledge cf the genuine to supply their place, in their
ignorance, rise in indignation and incredulous scorn
against all religion. Such was that of large portions
of Europe, and eminently that of France, in the
eighteenth century.  " Such," says Morell, speaking
of this skepticism of ignorance," is, to a great extent,
the present state of France. Happily, the diffusion
of religious truth is too general in England, to admit
the return, except, indeed, under the most extraordinary circumstances, of another age of unbelief in the
groundwork of man's natural religious sentiments."
Morell here announces the cause and the cure of this
species of unbelief. Imperfectly as the spiritual
curators and teachers of Britain had discharged their
trust, in consequence of her imperfect Protestantism,
still enough of religious truth had been diffused to
save her, amid the unbelief that like a storm swept
Catholic France.  If, on the overthrow  of a false
Christianity and philosophy by the Lutheran reform,
the skepticism of ignorance entered, that power we
are constrained to arraign, as chiefly responsible,
that for one thousand years had been the intellectual




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.        81
and spiritual dictator of Europe, the high priest of
its faith, worship, and philosophy —Rome. If we
inquire where in Christendom the Baconian philosophy was most abused to the production of infidelity,
and where first and chiefly it became the poisoner of
the nations, where it was perverted to the organ of a
war on heaven, and an elaborator of infernal arms,
and where it equipped the mightiest actors, and
achieved the most hideous triumphs in that impious
conflict, we are pointed at once to the countries of
her communion, and primarily and pre-eminently to
her most powerful satellite and champion in EuropeFrance. Its fair realm became, under its deadly perversion, a charnel-house.  The revocation of the
Edict of Nantz, and Bartholomew's fatal day, had
quenched in her bosom the religious reform, that
might have enlightened and saved the philosophic
reform; and had left that reform to run on, blind,
wild, and godless. Italy, Austria, and Spain owed
their apparent comparative exemption from the same
disasters to the fact, that in those countries religious
and philosophical reform, together with the reason
and life of the nations, seemed smothered in one
grave. The storm  of philosophic revolution beat
on England, but beat as beats the surf against
her island. The comparative enlightenment of her
masses, imperfect as it was, and the presence of well-.4&




82            CAUSE OF SKEPTCJISM.
armed and disciplined champions of her faith, which
Protestant liberty had prepared, stood her instead in
her hour of trial.
It was incidental also to a revolution in philosophy, such as We have above described, that in the
application of the new method, before men had by
trial learned the capacity of their instrument and the
limits of its power, there should be developed new
and partial systems of truth-p-arts of the great
myriad-faced unity-but not yet combined in harmony. All partial systems, pursued in isolation and
as the alone true, must produce distortion, absurdity,
and ultimately, skepticism.  Such was the case with
the sensational and the.ideal philosophies.  Each
represented a great truth; one the law of knowledge
of the outer, the other that of the inner world; but
either pursued exclusively and solitarily necessarily
led to unbelief; one to materialism, the other to
pantheism.
This evil tendency, incident to young and immature systems every  where, manifests itself with
especial frequency and mischief where the mind of
nations is not armed in a measure against it by
previous indoctrination in religious truth. HIence
though both these schools abounded and one originated in England, they were comparatively innocuous
till they passed to the Catholic realms of the Conti



REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.         83
nent or countries where Protestantism abandoned its
distinctive principle of spiritual liberty for —the
despotism  of its antagonist.  It was only where
liberty was unwonted, was seized violently, or its
light broke in on blinded and imprisoned nations,
that it wrought serious mischiefs.
Thus, looking at the philosophic revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as effective of
infidelity, we find the guilt of that efficiency resting,
not with Protestantism, but the opposite ecclesiastic
pole. That revolution was in itself a blessing. It
was made otherwise only by a spiritual despotism,
paralyzing and darkening the intellect and faith of
nations, and making mental emancipation wild and
mad from the sense of long enslavement and from
the newness of liberty.
In conclusion we ask then, shall Protestantism,
having emancipated the human mind from a thraldom that bound up all science, physical, inetaphysical, political as well as theological, and having
instaurated a philosophy of progress to which we
owe all improvements, scientific and social, that
divide us from ages of mediaeval barbarism,-shall
she have blame, because in so doing she rent away a
subtle and adcamantine scholasticism, with which
Rome had bound the nations to her power; and
because, in consequence, a false faith and a false




84           CAUSE OF SKEPTICISI.
philosophy perished together?  And when nations
thus emancipated, shall, because of the systematic
darkening and repression of mind pursued by Rome
towards themn for ages, stagger and wander into
strange and tortuous ways, at first, in the new light
and liberty, shall Protestantism bear the sins of thedespotism she attempted to overthrow? She found
the world fast moored by the old philosophy-moored
there for nearly two thousand years. She said, " Let
us on upon our voyage." It was a great hour when
she thus said "  Let us go on;" she cut the hawsers,
and, spite of wind and wave and current and storm,
we have moved on and are still moving; we are fast
leaving the rocks of the old coast-the shoals and
quicksands and typhoons of unbelief that wait round
those shores of death. We have already moved
along hopefully and gloriously, through two centuries of the voyage of humanity; and, with God and
Liberty to impel us, and an open Bible and free reason for our charts, we will go on unfearing.
I know there is a spiritual power in Christendom
that abhors light and liberty; and rightly; it
instinctively recognizes in them its mortal foes —
which studiously aims to darken nations, and naturally; for darkness is the hiding of its power; —which
anathematizes the free press and free speech and free
schools, and reasonably; for it lives by the repres



REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.          85
sion of the thought and utterance of mankind;
within-its pale ignorance is the mother of devotionat whose borders the railroad and telegraph have
been stopped as jealously as an invading plague;
and with right discernment of its vital interests; for
society can advance only over its ruins; with true
instinct it quarantines literature and cordons itself,
as it can, against ideas; for the spirit of the age
would consume it with the breath of its mouth, and
with the brightness of its coming., Naturally, therefore, it may look to the middle ages with regrets, as
to its lost millenium; and regard the free movement
given to the-European mind in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, with sheer dismay and horror;
not unnaturally it regards the philosophic revolution
in these centuries, as the opening of the bottomless
pit in the apocalypse, darkening the skies of Europe
with its shapes and shades.  But surely we, who
believe in light and liberty, shall be slow to regard
them as legitimately responsible for the denial of a
God and religion of light and liberty.  Is Protestantism to be condemned for the abuses and mischiefs
incident to the emancipation of mind?  Is liberty of
thought and belief a curse? Bind a man in fetters
and he will run off no precipice. Put out his eyes
and he will never see false. Shall all men therefore
be blinded and shut up in dungeons? KeeD the car




86            CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
fast bound to the station house, and it will never run
off the- track. Is the conductor therefore that will
not chain it up, responsible if it make a somerset
down an embankment, or into a chasm, because of
some neglected switch, or a drawbridge perversely
or maliciously left open?  lNo, give us eyes and
hands, and steam-cars, and with all their risk, we
thank you. So give society and give mind, liberty.
Iet us ~move. If we must perish, a hundred times
better by the cataract than the cess-pool.
Protestantism, then, as a revolutionist of philosophy
and emancipator of the intellect of Europe, were a
mighty benefactor; even if chargeable with all the
disasters to faith, and in consequence to society,
exhibited in the eighteenth century. But she is not
so chargeable. They were incidental, some of them,
to a transition period in civilization; a step in philosophic reform, which was inevitable and necessary to
social progress.  Nay more, we. affirm these evils
were many of them  so inseparable from that step,
because of the abuses of that very church which now
charges them on Protestantism as a crime; because
of its abuse of the faith and worship of the world;
its war on enlightenment and science, and the
instinctive rights of the human soul. Protestantism
is responsible so far as it apostatized from its first
principle, i. e. so far forth as it ceased to be Protes



REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.           87
tatiism, joined in the attempt at repression and
eplaemeP nt of the human mind, and with the ener ieqs f progress,
"grew pale
Lest men's judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth
Have too much light."'
If Protestantism therefore be arraigned for its phiosophy, as a crime, we are willing that Philosophy
should step forward and plead her own cause. She
may come before the court of History not merely
with intrepidity; with triumph she may lift her
hand to the great oath, that she has merited well of
the race of man.  She may say "I am the philosophy of liberty, life, progress. 1My defence-it is this
great living world around you —this mighty present
that bears you on. All that magnificent and infinite
array of improvements in industrial arts, in n mechanism, production and exchange; all these inventions
and discoveries that arm man's hand with a grasp
and sway of the forces of nature; all those advances
in science, government, and in the general comfort
and embellishment, the ennoblement and culture of
life, that divide the seventeenth from the fifteenth
century-these are my argument.  I have brought
sociedty further in three hundred, than it traversed
before in ten times three hundred years.  I have




88            CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
spangled over zones with cities of machinery.  I
have made the desolate rock, and waste and dismal
morass to bloom with purple and scarlet and gold.
I have covered the seas with fleets that are borne by
their own tempest against wind and wave and tide.
I have stretched the loom of commerce in wares and
ideas, between strange nations and across mysterious
oceans. I have exalted the valleys and brought low
the heights, have pierced the mountain, bridged vast
and torrent rivers, and banded continents with iron
roads. I have vastly -increased and varied the productions of the earth, and the occupation and support of man. I have infinitely multiplied the manufacture and diffusion of appliances for the well-being
of society; and have widened the intercourse of
business and of thought among mankind. I mitigate
disease. I disarm the plague. I draw off silently
and innocuously the wrath of the thunder-cloud. I
steal from light its pencil; I make the lightning the
bearer of human thought, and the agent of a universal and simultaneous consciousness of nations.  I
have opened for man the hidden treasure-house of
the mountains, the mysteries of the zones of eternal
frost and fire, and the secrets of the seas and the
skies; I have inaugurated him, as God decreed him
at first, Lord of nature, and I have made him victor
of storm and tide, of distance and solitude, of tropic




REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY.         89
heat and polar ice. In the spiritual and ideal realm
also, I have placed man in the paths of an illimitable
advance.  I have imparted to him the key and
method of the true Dialectic-the logic that shall
grasp, analyze, and frame to new, glorious and mighty
forms, tile subtle and shifting phenomena of the
world of thought. I have given the laws of perpetual progression in intellectual, moral and religious
truth; and formularies that shall open to the soul
new and wondrous fields of knowledge, ever widening, as far as is permitted the children of this life to
gaze.
I" Modern Civilization-with its legislation, economy
and education, its institutions and improved methods
and appliances for the elevation and enlightenment
of the million —this is my mighty and glorious pupil;
and I marshal it toward a future of indefinite grandeur, power and beauty. I have created and instanrated for society a science of itself, and am placing
in its hands the directory of an endless march; ever
onward and upward, till the philosophy of a new
dispensation takes up its instruction on the plains of
Heaven. My past achievements are but the promise of my infancy. I am yet but in the beginning
of my ways. The boundless future is mine. I am
the philosophy of life and growth; the genius and
guardian of an infinite progress; and especially the




90           CAUSE OF SKEPTICISM.
elaborator, conservator and champion of genuine
Faith. If I have been abused, so have all God's
gifts-so has all liberty —so has light —so has life.
Under these skies, death alone has no perversion,
no insanity, no disease."
We will be content then, thus to leave the philosophy of Protestantism amid her own monuments to
plead her own cause; confident that that plea is
sufficient vindication of that communion that patronizes her.
The curse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not liberty or enlightenment. It was not
that the sun had risen, but that an evil angel had
poured out his vial of wrath on the orb of light; not
able thereby to quench it, but giving it power to
burn men as with fire.   And men were scorched
with the great heat and blasphemed the God of
Heaven."




MAMMONISM.                       91
CHAPTER IV.
MAINMONISHL
Rise of the Idea of Wealth to the Ascendency in European Society
-Causes-Subsidence  of Religious Passions-Old  paths of
National Aggrandizement closed up-Transfer of Ambition and
Enterprise to new Desertions-Progress of Society in Wealth and
Productive Art-The Era of Economies-Mississippi SchemesEast Indies-Ventures-South  Sea Bubbles-The Money-God
Supreme-The new Philosophy his Minister-Acme of his Reign at
Paris under the Regent of Orleans-Law's Banking Scheme — The
Saturnalia of Mammon-Rise of the Idea of Wealth a Necessity
of Social Progress-Why so Disastrous to Faith?-Money-mania
in France and England Compared- Dangers to Modern Society
from Mammonism.
ANOTHER cause of the infidelity and irreligion of
the eighteenth century, is found in the new  ideas
that took possessson of Suropen, poitics amd society
and in the consequent new direction given to national
and  individual life  and  efTirt.  From   the  causes
I have already noticed, the great religious passion
and agonism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had subsided.  The Ieligious idea was dethroned; and after tihe  Jetignmus and political settlement
of Europe by the.,-eaky of Westphalia a new idea




92            CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
and passion rise to the ascendency in the European
mind; namely those of WEALTH.
The great conflagration of the religious wars had
burned out. Its fires had in a measure died away in
the council chamber and the battle-field, and in the
heart of nations. The hopes of decided ecclesiastical
victory and of European empire, as between either
of the great religious parties, had been perforce
abandoned. The avenues to political aggrandizement through the alliance and aid of either of these
parties, or by appeals to the religious passions which
had animated them, had been closed up. The
ambition of dynasties and the energies of nations,
obstructed in these paths, henceforth seek another
direction. By the law of transfer in the diseases of
civilization, IMlammonism takes possession of the
European mind. The money-god sits supreme in all
temples. Political economies are his gospels: and
of these again, the new philosophy and the Encyclopoedists are expositors.
Not that man had not always loved money; or
that the lust of gold is the peculiar vice of any age.
But in this era, it suddenly towers aloft. Supreme
and almost alone in the cabinets and amid the
peoples of Europe. It takes a precedence hitherto
unexampled amid the ruling ideas of history and the
passions of nations. We enter on the birth-era of




MAMMONISM.                 93
mercantile, agricultural and manufactural systems,
of navigation acts, colonial policies, of tariffs and
trade-laws, of Mississippi Schemes, East India companies, South Sea Bubbles. Through maritime discovery and adventure, the direct commerce of the
Indies newly opened, the gold and silver of Mexico
and Peru, the progress of art, science and industry,
and the general advancement of society, the wealth
of nations was vastly increased and naturally became
a ruling interest.
This new direction of the ruling ideas of Europe,
in a measure necessitated by the obstruction of old
paths of aggrandizement and the exhaustion or despair of religious passions, was moreover especially
stimulated by the examples of England, Holland and
Portugal. These were regarded as signal illustrations of the power of wealth to aggrandize nations;
and as brilliant proofs of new paths to national greatness opened through commerce, manufactures, colonies, and political economies regulative of the industrial energies of peoples. Spain moreover was still
dazzling Europe with her delusive spoils and trophies
of colonial empire.
The treaty of Westphalia, adjusting and settling
the limits of countries, left little room for territorial
aggrandizement on the map of Europe; and the
nations rushed with eagerness into the new game of




94            CAUSE OF iNFIDELITY.
greatness opened to them. They embark in schemes
of national wealth, domestic and foreign. Through
mercantile, manufactural, colonial and agricultural
economies, Christendom is to become one vast plantation, manufactory, and exchange. Each county is
to be husbanded as a garden. All art and industry
-production, consumption, traffic-are to be perfectly systematized and mechanized; regulated as
methodically as if one vast farm-house, workshop or
mart. In short, nations are to become vast machines
adjusted and worked for the production of wealth.
Prussia, in its internal policy, becomes especially the
model kingdom of this economic administration.
Her territorial smallness was to be elaborated by
economies to riches and.greatness.  Smith, Malthus
and the economists are the evangelists of the New
Era.
This direction of the mind of Europe was, like its
emancipation in the reallm of philosophy, probably a
necessity of the stage of civilization which it had
reached; a necessary means and consequence of the
rise of the masses and the increased physical prosperity of nations.  It was also-like the philosophic
revolution synchronizing with it-productive of vast
benefits and vast mischiefs to mankind.  Vast industrial enterprises; improvements in the arts, appliances, comfort and power of human life; advance



MAMMONISM.                  95
ment in political and social institutions-in the
police, security, production, the greatness and
strength of nations-follow in its train.  It stands
related as cause and effect to the enfranchisement,
enlightenment and elevation of the millions. As
wealth and industrial and productive power rose in
the social scale, the industrial and productive masses
of course rose also. But together with those benefits
this supremacy of the idea of wealth undoubtedly
conspired powerfully with other causes to push the
world from the realm of faith.
Mammonism, or the passion of wealth, is often
charged as the vice of Protestantism; and with a
color of truth; as a passion of wealth naturally associates itself with the successful pursuit of it; with
the intelligence, activity, and enterprise which are
produced and quickened  by freedom, intellectual
and civil, and which ensure success to such pursuits. Protestantism is.undoubtedly a powerful stimulant to the mind of nations; it gives civilization
a vastly increased power of every kind.  Now
wealth and power are wont to breed a passion for
themselves. And this passion, not restrained by a
vital Christianity, may become a sordid avarice, or
rapacious ambition. Still we deem it no condemnation of a faith, that it brings wealth and power;
especially as we have ample evidence in the history




96            CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
of modern Europe, that a church may impoverish
nations without protecting their piety or virtue. No
faith can shut out the danger of MIiammonism, which
does not shut out the faculty of wealth and sink a
people toward a state of savageism. But the epidemic Mammonism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was confined to the limits of no communion. Indeed the acme of its fever was in a country
and capital of the Romish Faith.
But however caused and wherever it prevailed, it
must unquestionably be noted as one of the most
effective causes of the general skepticism of the age.
In the first place it is evident that the supremacy
of the _assiom of uwealth over civilization tends to
secularize and unspirituqaize it-to make it worldly
and sensual.  The declaration of our Saviour "ye
cannot serve God and Mammon," holds ever true.
If men cleave to the one, they will despise the other.
If Mammon is enthroned, the face of Jehovah fades
from the sky. The lust of gain, as a supreme principle of action and pursuit, degrades and corrupts
the soul of the individual or the age. It is the most
unheroic of passions. Magnanimity, sincerity, and
generous sentiment, it wars on. Cunning, adroitness,
finesse, are its virtues. Fraud, treachery, simulation,
cold selfishness, are its means and ministers.  It
breeds a distrust of truth and heroism. Of course it




MAMMONISM.                 97
is most widely at variance with the genius of Christianity, and little attracted to accept it. Most difficult is it for it, of all passions, to "enter into the
kingdom of Heaven."  It breeds moreover passions
and vices which naturally seek to hide from God
behind the veil of skepticism. It soon leaves little
power of faith in anything noble and good, much
less in God. There is terrible interaction between
avarice and infidelity, as between corruption and
death: one breeds the other.
Moreover the ascendency of this idea over society
naturally associates with itself a luxury which emasculates and debauches the soul, and leaves it hardly
energy or manhood for earnest Christian belief.
Thus the supremacy of the idea of wealth divides
society more and more widely from religious faith.
Long ascendant, it relaxes, enfeebles, corrupts, intoxicates it; till ultimately it goes into utter dissolution.
This was illustrated in the course of civilization in
the eighteenth century from the various causes enunferated. The lust of gold had rusted and corroded
through the  entire society of the times.  The
mightier and nobler false gods had disappeared from
their shrines.  Mammon, the "meanest and least
erect of spirits that fell from  Heaven," alone
remained. The generous fever of the previous era
had subsided. The pulse of humanity beat low; a
5




98            CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.slow cold corrupting palsy was icing stealthily around
the heart and brain. Not now for God or glory or
for beauty, but for gain were all things. For this
men fought and plotted and chaffered; for this they
made treaties, alliances, peace and war; for this
they legislated, planted colonies, established manufactures, tariffs, trade-laws, colonial and commercial
systems, coerced agriculture, instituted banks, inflated and exploded financial bubbles. For this they
explored new seas and savage continents; they
ravaged ancient realms; plundered barbaric monarchies; they dismembered kingdoms; they blotted
old nationalities from the map of Europe; they prostrated the public law and political system of Europe
in the dust. Everything revolved around the money
question. Negotiation, legislation, foreign and internal policies, fulfillment or violation of treaties,
manners, sentiment, opinions, literature, morality,
and even religion, seemed grouped waiting around
the question, will it pay?  All things hadt their
money-representative and equivalent. Faith, honor,
heroism, patriotism, justice, chastity, piety —all had
their prices. Power, empire, beauty, fame, grace,
the favor of man, and even of God, were exposed for
sale.   Courts, monarchs, hierarchs, pontiffs, the
church, and even Hieaven itself in priestly finance,
were venal.  Genius, wit, taste, imagination, elo



MAMMONISM.                       99
quence  and  song, philosophy  and  statesmanship,
ministered, liveried and lacquered, in the antechamber of Mamnlon.   Finance was god of the world,
from hovel to palace, possessing each interest. In
his train waited frauds, treacheries, disloyalties,
hypocrisies; rapacity joined with waste, luxury with
cruelty, pleasure mottled with murder, and "lust
hard by hate." It was the reign of the money god
who had taken possession of the vacant temple of
European worship and the nations were prostrate
before him.
" On a blazing throne of gems and gold,
The prize of many a damned soul,
There sat a king deformed and old,
Yellow and shrunk and foul:
The glittering bribe, the tempting purse
Spread there their unresisted lure,
For baits to prove the proud man's curse,
And keep the miser poor.
In his palsied hand the monarch gave
The radiant stone and blushing ore,
To mighty prince, and grovelling slave,
That knelt his throne before;
Gorging their food like worms i' the grave
And screaming loud for more.
"As amongst that cursed and greedy crew
The murderer thrust his blood-stained hands,
Where Beauty's palms of lily hue
The price of guilt demands:




100               CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Sin caught the dbspot in her arms,
And kissed his slimy jaws,
And shame exposed her wanton charms,
To gain his prized applause:
There the hero brought his hireling steel,
The bard his venal song,
While patriots sold the public weal,
The tyrants cherished wrong;
Monks uttered blasphemies to kneel
The favored of that throng.
"'And they all devoured this precious food
With more than human zest,
Though bringing poison to the blood
And anguish to the breast:
Like vultures upon carrion fare,
They greedily fed on;
And fiercely seized their neighbor's share
Whene'er their own was gone:
As that crowned ghoul his gifts bestowed
With regal pomp and pride;
From those foul lips no language flowed,
But still the dupes he eyed,
Hurrying on to death's abode,
And cursed them as they died;
Shouting,' Hail, Oh first of the sons of Ammon!
Hail to the great god Mammon 1'"
In such a world, where the lust of gold had succeeded to religious enthusiasm and fanaticism, we do
not wonder that faith could not abide. Nor again
can we wonder that rapacity, cut loose from the




MAMMONISM.               101
restraints of faith, should have gone forth to make
society desolate of the common virtues, and tear
down the pillars of social order; to fiil the seas with
rapine, plunder and slay states and tear to shreds
the public law of the world. We do not wonder
that provinces were estimated at the productive and
taxable energies of the human machines in them, and
were bargained and transferred like herds of cattleWe do not wonder at finding infidel monarchs,
ecclesiastics and philosophers uniting in their conspiracy against religion and law, now fraternizing
in the revel of impiety, now plotting each other's
robbery-as in case of the conspiracies of regal
scoundrels for the dismemberment of Austria, Bavaria and Prussia-now pointing a witticism at Jesus
Christ, and now pouring their ruffian armies upon
Poland; now crowned with chaplets in the flowerfestivals of the goddess of Reason, singing ballads
preluding the advent of the_ godless golden age;
now mingling in the bloody orgies of revolution that
seemed to have torn open the infernal abyss.
This money-mania seems, like almost all distemperatures in modern civilization, to have exhibited the
acme of its madness at Paris. This took place early
in the eighteenth century, under the excitement of
Law's famous banking scheme, in the time of the
Regent of Orleans-a scheme which >dazzled and




102          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
attracted all Europe with the enormousness of its
powers, prizes and promises. The scheme was to pay
off two thousand millions of the debt of Louis XIV.
by a single splendid stroke of finance. The bank was
to be shored up by the commerce of the East and
West Indies, and that of empires that were to spring
up in the vast and mysterious Eldorado of the Mississippi. The imaginations of men were astounded
with the magnificent hopes opening to them. It
was as if an Australia or California were opened
right in the capital of European civilization. At,
the time of the sale of the shares in 1719, the scene
as described by Louis Blanc, indicates that the force
of the madness could no further go.
In his History of the Causes of the French Revolution (page 175) he thus narrates:" We would surpass the limits of our subject were
we to follow all the details of so vast an operation.
But the effect which it produced has a too direct
connection with that transformation of manners and
that displacement of strength, out of which the revolution was to spring, for us not to pause over it.
"The excitement caused by the sale of the shares
was intense. Who has not heard of the Rue Quincampoix and its stormy renown? Impatience of
gain, the hope of retrieving a ruined foitune quickly,
a presumptuous desire to brave destiny, a need of




MAMMONISM.                103
forgetfulness and of excitement, the poignant uncertainties which the heart in its folly dreads and seeks,
the torments of which it is greedy, were all found
strongly raised and at play, within the space of a few
feet. Thus, courtiers, churchmen, courtesans, members of parliament, monks, abbes, clerks, soldiers,
adventurers from every part of Europe, hastened to
the Rue Quincampoix, to be rolled in a heap and
mingled together in a huge pell-mell. The inequality of ranks disappeared there before the equality
of human weaknesses and passions. The pride of
the great ones of the earth was publicly drawn out
to receive an exemplary chastisement in the eyes of
the multitude.  Fraternity reigned through stockjobbing until something better turned up. Prelates
dragged the Roman purple through the mob,. and
princes of the blood bought or sold the papel
between courtesans and lackeys. Even foreign sovereigns had their representatives in the thickest of
this crowd, which was by turns drunk with hope or
r-ozen by alarm, a confused, entangled, palpitating
crowd, which the ebb and flow of play agitated
incessantly, and from which a sinister noise arose.
There was not a house in the famous street which
was not divided into dens for speculators. Avidity
took up its abode in them from the roof to the cellar.
They stock-gambled by the light of the sun, and also




104          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
by that'of torches. To own a miserable shop in this
quarter, was to have one's hand upon a gold mine.
*  *  *  *  There were offices for sale and purchase; here was that of the Sieur le Grand, the
treasurer of France, there that of the Sieur Negret
de Granville, an old farmer of the aids and domains.
A  place was wanted to write upon; they had
recourse to living desks, and the unfortunate. made
fortunes by hiring out their shoulders; they would
have hired their souls; as long as the fever lasted,
paper had the advantage over gold which the imagination has over the reality. Thus two men drew
their swords one day in the street, the seller of shares
wishing to be paid in paper, and the buyer of them
wishing to pay in gold. The confusion soon became
so great, that it became necessary to have a guard
of archers, commanded by an officer of the Short
Robe, at each end of the street. Regular agitations
still more terrible succeeded this tumultuous agitation. The Le Blancs, the Verzenobres, the Andres,
the Pavillons, the Fleurys, commanded the movements by their emissaries, and kept the key of the
storm-bag. * * * * * There was a general
upsetting of fortunes; there was a metamorphosis in
situations, comparable only with the ancient Saturnalia. *  *   X * The Duke de Bourbon and the
Prince de Conti, were at the head of the speculators




MAMMONISM.               105
of renown, and the nobles followed in crowds. Many
of the gentry surrounded the door of Law, the chief
distributor of subscriptions, and passed whole hours
there waiting for Law's presence, with a sordid
anxiety, begging a look from. him as a favor, and
wearying his contempt by the excess and degradation of their cupidity. Not content with flattering
him, recently an obscure stranger, and the son of a
goldsmith of Edinburgh, they flattered his mistress,
his daughter, still a child, even Thierry his valet.
The court of Law was increased by many women of
quality, momentarily escaped from the court of the
Regent, and the governor of the bank became the
object of their pursuits, the ardor of gain silencing
their shame. Nothing was omitted, which was of a
nature to dissipate old prestiges. It was in the company' of the Targez, and the Poterats, that Louis
lHenry de Bourbon, the Marshal d' Estrees, the
Prince de ralmont, the Baron Breteuil, managed the
business. In the list of the directors of the India
Gompany, might be read by the side of the name
of the Regent of France, that of Saint Edme, known
at the fair of Saint Laurent as the chief of the
mountebanks.  *  *  *  *  *  A great lord, the
Marquis d'Oyse, the son and younger brother of the
Duke de Villars-Brancas, was shameless enough to
take the daughter of the stock-gambler Andre, only
5*




106           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
three years old, as his wife, on condition that her
dowry should be paid in advance."
Surely in a world with such a central scene we
need not wonder that infidelity coupled with Mammonism seemed to have poisoned the moral life of
universal society.
We point therefore to the ascendency of the idea
of wealth, in the cabinets of princes - and in general
society, as one of the causes of skepticism;. yet not a
cause, be it noted, in itself alone necessitating such a
reszlt; but powerfully and fatally cooperating with
other causes in the production of it. In view however of its efficiencies towards a result so universal
and so disastrous, we are compelled to inquire what
gave this cause in this era such a peculiar malignancy  What made the pursuit of wealth in that
age so godless and so corrupting?
The passion of wealth is one of the dominant
passions of our own time. It leaps through the
veins of our universal civilization like a burning
fever; still I think I may say the age is not infidel.
What then gave its peculiar virus of infidelity and
godlessness at that time? There must have been
elements especially malignant conspiring and blending with it.
There were causes inherent in the history of the
times and in the stage of civilization which Europe




MAMMONISM..107
had attained, giving increased prominence and power
to wealth, and stirring to the pursuit of it, with the
intensity of a new and strange passion.'The very
increase of wealth in itself and the general causes
elevating the industrial masses and creative of a
third estate, necessitated such a consequence. But
nevertheless a step essential in the progress of civilization, and requisite to the development of its power
and to the accomplishment of vast and benificent
physical, and to social and even moral achievement;
such a step in the life of society, as was that out of
which the idea of wealth rose to power, we are confident, God would have enabled society to take,
without consequences so dreadful, but for great
crimes of society itself and.a most guilty feebleness
or neglect or apostasy of the great moral vitalizer of
society-the Church, or the body representing Christianity.
The malignant, epidemic Mammonism of the age
demands our attention both as effect and cause. As,an effect, it undoubtedly points us in part to the very
causes that we have before noticed in this discussion
as directly producing infidelity. It was because the
Church, over most of Europe despotic, and in many
countries, and especially in that where this madness
raged most fiercely, warring on human reason and
enlightenment, had lost its grasp and control of the




108           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
age-had no power to purify, moderate or direct
aright its passions. The Church —the power representative of Christianity-by its denial of man's
instinctive right of private judgment, and by its
cruelties towards the assertor of those rights, and by
associating itself with political tyranny through
almost the entire continent, had brought on itself the
hatred and scorn of mankind; and had consequently
no, power to perform for society, when tried by the
passion of wealth, the proper function of a moral
guardian and curator. It could not discharge the
office of a religion, viz., to bind, curb, moderate and
temper the desires and impulses of society when
impelled to disastrous and guilty excess. Its oppression moreover had kept nations in perpetual moral
pupilage, had dwarfed and crippled their moral
energies, and impaired their power of independent
self-government and self-restraint. Society consequently encountered the temptation without the
habit or power of resistance, and it is not strange it
was overborne. It must be so with any faith formed
without the free exercise of the right of private judgment. It is not genuine faith. It is a mere sham,
It has no foundation in our self-consciousness, none
in perceived evidence. It has no logic to defend itself against its own doubts or the assaults of others.
The consciousness of never having proved itself by




MAMMONISM.                 109
personal examination, or the examination of others
in whose opinion it reposes its trust, must carry a
fatal timidity and feebleness into all its results. In
the time of temptation such faith will fall away; and
that, whether it be the faith of individuals or of
nations.  When it ceases to be a superstition or a
fanaticism, it is nothing. It ever is and must be a
most miserable defence against either irreligion or
unbelief; or any of those passions that from time to
time sweep society like moral storms. Add to this
feebleness necessarily incidental to any faithl under
coercion and restriction of examination, the sense of
wrongs inflicted tyrannously and cruelly on the
private reason and the conscience; the indignation
and scorn arising in the mind from the attempt
fraudulently to palm off, or authoritatively to enforce,
the most puerile falsehoods and absurdities, and the
most drivelling superstitions.  Add the disgust that
must arise in it, at seeing a religion without morality,
a Christianity without charity, a Church at once
superstitious and sensual, fanatic and hypocritical,
licentious and tyrannical; add all these and we shall
see forces enough at work utterly to strip religion of
its power over the epidemic lusts of nations or eras,
be they for gold or empire, and to cause social distemperatures to be left to run their course in entire riot;
enough to push the human mind from the regions of




110           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
its twilight faith into the thick dalkness of irreligion
and infidelity; and to impel it on to that madness of
worldly passion and pursuit that arises from dimness
or despair of the future, and crushes our eternal
aspirations into this hour of life.
In proof of the correctness of this reasoning, we
appeal to the comparative experience of the different
countries of Europe which passed through the trial of
the money-epidemic together. Where did the money
madness strike deepest, and leave the most deplorable  consequences?   In  Protestant or Catholic
Europe?  In Catholic. The storm of trial beat hard
upon England-harder than perhaps on any other
nation in Europe, in proportion as her industrial
energies were most active and most stimulated by
civil liberty, and upon her, gushed most profusely
the golden stream  of wealth.  But though the
national mind may have reeled a moment, it was not
intoxicated nor overborne. The snaring influences
of a world's commerce, and almost a world's wealth,
of a national policy eminently mercantile, of interests
and institutions, and foreign and domestic administration swayed by finance —all these were around
the English mind.  But there was in that mind,
imperfect as was English Protestantism, enough of
the energy of Christian truth and liberty to withstand
these influences. That mind, as far as the great mass




MAMMONISM.                111
of the nation were concerned, held fast its sobriety
and its loyalty to Christianity, and almost stood alone
erect in Christendom. In France, on the other hand
-the head of Catholic Europe-the excesses of
atheism and of the money phrenzy were both wildest and nearly synchronous. Why was this? Absolute power in Church and State had made minds in
her, inert and paralytic, or insurgent and disloyal
toward Christianity, and exposed her defenceless to
the corruptions of IMlammon.
In the other country some degree-though imperfect-of spiritual liberty, had educated and disciplined the mind of the nation to self-sustained and
energetic faith; to love Christ and Christianity independent of the Church, and armed it with deep and
steadfast vital principles. Spain and other Catholic
powers, that were less affected by the prevalent
passion and enterprise for wealth, and which were
not swayed so disastrously by it to infidelity, owed
their partial exemption simply to the fact that despttism, civil and spiritual, had there done its deadly
work with a more  hideous completeness —lad
through the terrible energy and thoroughness of the
Inquisition, so utterly quenched spiritual liberty and
enlightenment, that the nation sank below the circle
of the ideas of the age, and-was in a great measure




112           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
cut off from modern civilization. They escaped the
perils of the transition period because they were
stationary. They had no emancipation of mind, no
revolution of philosophy, no rise of a third estate;
they were exempt from the perils of progress and
corruptions of enterprise. They escaped convulsion
in permanent paralysis; the dangers of youth, in the
imbecility of perpetual childhood. They fell below
the range of the temptations and dangers of the
period. To the degree that they were less afflicted
by defiant and frantic atheism, they owed their
exemption to a slavish superstition and abject ignorance. They had not life enough for fever, or spasm,
or delirium. The same oppression that had suppressed Protestantism in them, had nearly crushed
the vitality out of their civilization, and they had
less of throes and agony only because they were
nearer death.
The difference of the effects of despotic repression
on minds, as between France and Spain, was the
difference between killing a man and putting his
eyes out. In one, the national mind seemed utterly
crushed and smothered; in the other, it was blinded
as it regards religion, but the passions of life and
fever of intoxication were rioting as fiercely in the
veins as ever.  In France despotic repression had




MAMMONISM.               113
driven thought into wide and wild paths every way;
but had shut up avenuesto the true faith. In Spain
it seemed to have quenched thought itself.
To the common charge, therefore, that Mammonism
or the undue ascendency of the idea of wealth in
communities-is a vice of Protestantism, we answer:
it is obnoxious to this imputation only as it produces
that industrial activity, skill and energy, and that
prosperity and enlightenment of the masses, and that
financial accumulation, enterprise and policy, from
which the ascendency of this passion may spring.
It makes nations money-loving, simply as it makes
them money-getting and money-having. There is
a faith that usually enforces its voice of poverty on
nations if not on its acolytes and devotees-which
delivers from Mammonism, by removing its prizes,
by destroying the industrial energies, intelligence,
art, enterprise; which wait on freedom of thought,
and which alone enable nations successfully to enter
into the competitions of production and traffic.
But alas, we find that nations can be poor without
being pure; that idleness, ignorance, thriftlessness
and mendicity are no guaranty of Christian faith
and virtue. We find, again, where the despotism
over thought has not succeeded in extinguishing
fiscal enterprise and prosperity, it leaves the passion
generated of and proper to that enterprise and pros



114          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
perity, the most wild, exorbitant and without moral
curb. It was, we may notice, in a country not
Protestant that the money-mania was maddest and
deadliest to the faith of nations.
This chapter in the history of the past admonishes
not of the safety or desirableness of poverty, but of
the necessity of counteracting the dangers which an
era of Mammonism, like the one in which we live,
must ever bring to faith and life, by the protective
and restorative power of a free, vigorous and enlightened Christianity.
The theme is one of profound and solemn relevancy to our times. The melancholy cataclasm  of
the last century warns us of present peril. The lust
of gold leaps through all the veins of the modern
world. It burns through all our civilization. All
passions and pursuits converge in this.  All the
prizes of society are in the gift of Mammon. The
multitudinous, multifarious, infinite business of the
world-its productions, manufactures, exchange-all
are a constant discipline to the love of money. If
another era of unbelief awaits us, we shall enter it
through the portals of Mammon. The path to that
abyss will be draped with purple and shine with
gold. Railways, steamships, mysteries of mechanism, the wonders of art, Califorlias, Australias, will
marshal us that way. The spirit of the age already




MAMMONISM.                115
feels the spell of the mightv fascination. From this
one thing only shall save us. No glittering cathedral, or purple hierarchies, or pomp of superstition, or
awe of antiquity or authorities; no slavish, no dogmatic, no ignorant, no dead faith, nothing but the
energy, the power, the intelligence, the spirit, the
life of an earnest, enlightened faith, communing
freely with the Scriptures and the Spirit of Truth.
Never in any age has there been such vital need
of an earnest, active, intelligent and free Church, as
now and in our own country. The richer our prosperity, the more intense our necessity. Without it
the golden stream on which we sail, bears us surely
to the doom of ancient Tyre and the nations of oldwhom riches slew.  We hurry through Mammonism to godlessness and dissolution. From the era
when Jugurtha departing from Rome, shook vengefully his hand just threatened with Roman chains, at
that capital of the earth, with the ominous menace,'Ah doomed city! sold, if only you can find a
purchaser;"-from that era, her faith and her mlanhood sickened together under the blight of the lust
of gold. No longer glory or country or religion;
no temple or shrine or home; but gain, plunder,
luxury-these were the battle-cry, that led on her
legions. The overspreading Mammonism and Epicurism, together with the Atheism, that followed,




116           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
are abundantly noted in the orators and satirists and
historians of the close of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. So along that future of infinite
wealth, and infinite stimulants to the passions for
wealth, opening to our age, this generation will walk
with more peril than through a field bristling with
the arms of a world. A  faith that walks with a
living Christ and an open Bible, that is active, manly, enterprising, beneficent and free, and which commrands the intellect and conscience of the age, alone
can save us. Without this the golden clouds that
float over and about us, will settle down all around
our sky, and we shall see beyond no God, no Heaven,
no immortality, nor the frightful grave that waits us,
hid in that "' field of the cloth of gold."




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.                117
CHAPTER V.
SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.
Spiritual Despotism, the Cause of Causes-Era of Absolutism-Double- Despotism over Europe-Treaty of Westphalia- Military
Monarchies-Hopelessness and helplessness of the Millions-Intellectual repression-Mind driven from the Practical to the Speculative-License of Speculative Thought-The World Undermined —
War on Private Judgment-A War on the Faith of Nations —The
Spiritual Power Darkened and Emasculated-Intellectual imbecillity of the Church —Ecclesiastical Literature in Protestant and
Catholic Europe.
THE  theme we now  propose to  consider is SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM, related as a cause to the Great
Apostasy of Christendom in the eighteenth century.
We wish to direct especial attention to it, not simply
because of the importance of it as afact, in its historic relations to the particular phenomenon we
investigate, but because of its essential and immortal
malignancy as a principle, in all times and all forms,
and because, like a chronic cleaving curse, it fastens
on society through all changes.  Hideously prominent, it stands out on the page of both logic and
history, as the enemy of faith, and in countless
subtle, shifting disguises, it walks the whole earth,




118           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
this hour. It lingers in every clime; in every civilization; in every communion; perhaps I might say
without paradox, in every human bosom. It is a
spirit of that sort that cometh not out without prayer
and fasting, and seldom too without' tearing the
victim it leaves.
The great disaster to faith, of modern society in
the transition era of its philosophy and civilization
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is often
charged on the principle of Liberty or Protestantism.
But history as well as philosophy, seem to us unmistakably to point to directly the opposite principleDes!potism, as the great cause of the defection of the
human mind from religious faith during the above
period. She points especially to the double despotism of Church and State, that peculiarly marks this
period. In baleful conjunction, civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies hung in double orb over the sky of
Europe for a century; like the plague-struck sun in
the apocalypse, tormenting the nations.
By despotism, I mean lordship, mastery, dominion,
of man over man, or mind over mind; the forceful
rule of the opinion, reason, or will, of the one, as
matter of authority and command, over those of the
many.  Such lordship applied to religion, we call
spiritual despotism; to politics, political despotism;
to philosophy and science, intellectual despotism.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           119
Spiritual despotism wielded by the Church, is named
ecclesiastical. Ecclesiastical despotism united with
the State, as ally, instrument or master, is termed
politico-ecclesiastical despotism.  By spiritual despotism in this chapter, I mean either despotism
wielded by the spiritual power, or that over spiritual
interests.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
human mind was peculiarly feeling the curse of a
double or rather triple despotism; which had been
plaguing the earth for ages, but then with especial
and combined pressure, crushed down humanity.
Intellectual, spiritual, political —all united, and with
peculiar virulence, in its triple hideousness, presented a terrible completeness'of tyranny, almost
without parallel in the worst ages. It seemed like
an attempt to smother the life of the world. Attempt,I say;, for happily the triumph, the absolutism of this tyranny, was never an achieved fact.
Its attempt had in God's mercy been deferred in
human history, till it could be only an attempt. The
movement was too late for perfect success. Nevertheless it wrought in the earth a mighty curse. It
was the repression and perturbation caused by the
attempt of this triple despotism to master society,
that drove the mind of Europe wide and wild from
its healthful and natural course.  It was not the




120          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
emancipation of the reason, but the attempt tofetter
it when partially emancipated, that wrought the
mischief. It was not the stream itself, but the dykes
and dams thrown across its otherwise beneficent and
fertilizing current, that caused the inundation that
swept the world.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
peculiarly the era of absolute monarchy in Europe.
The period of which we treat (1648-1790), opens with
the scene of thrones surrounded with standing armies.
The military has succeeded to the feudal monarchy.
The terrible convulsion of one hundred and fifty
years of religious war has torn feudalism to pieces,
or has broken, impoverished and prostrated it, all
through Western Europe.  The new finance of
nations, now feeds armies formerly sustained by
feudal loyalty and treasure; indeed, far vaster
standing forces than feudal history everknew. Thus
the new-born political economy and the science of
wealth marking the progress of society in various
interests, become the arts of tyranny. The invention
of gunpowder, and the new arts and appliances of
war, have converted it into a science of mere
mechanized masses; a mathematical problem, rather
than a game of chivalry.
Christendom has just emerged from the great
drawn battle of the Reformation; but has emerged




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          121
in armor. It now presents an array of states in a
permanent armed truce. Large military establishments, created by ages of religious warfare and sustained by the new finance, are now deemed necessary
by states to watch and guardc against each other, in
time of peace. The throne appears no longer girt
with baronial swords, but surrounded by myriads of
bayonets; not only as a defence against aggression
from abroad, but as a ready and terrible instrument
of enforcing a mechanic obedience at home; and of
repressing and crushing the liberties of the subject
millions.
And, to make the despotism more oppressive,
those liberties have now no constitutional or institutional defences. The restrictions of feudalism, the
rights of estates, the privileges of classes and orders,
baronial prerogatives and provincial liberties, had to
a great extent perished in the convulsions of the
previous period. There was now no breakwater
against the central despotism or monarchy. Nations
are seen prostrated with no intervention of shield or
defence before the throne.
Under the tyranny of Charles the Fifth, and still
more under the Tiberian despotism of Philip Second
the feudal and provincial liberties of Spain, order by
order, province by province, and kingdom by kingdom, had been beaten down. The -dark bigotry of
6




1f8 ii        CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Ferdinand Second, had, after generations of cruel
and religious wars, effected the same in the vast
estates of Austria-Hungary, Bohemia and Austria
proper; and at the close of thirty years war, in consequence of the long rule of violence and mere arms,
Germany, throughout its multitude of states, presents
a group of petty or powerful military despotisms;
while Prussia, under the ambition of the House of
Brandenburgh, exhibits itself, in this as in other
respects, one of the most perfect types of the tendencies of the age. In France, the aristocracy has for
the most part perished in the civil wars; and
baronial parliamentary liberties lie crushed beneath
the throne of the Bourbons. In Sweden, Denmark,
and the Northern powers, the same tendency toward
absolute monarchy is manifested. In England, it is
the rule of the Tudors and the Stuarts. In short, as I
said before, it is the era of absolutism; the baron has
sunk in the courtier: the privileges of estates are
prostrate; and royalty stands alone amid its cordon
of mechanic and mercenary legions; alone, save
that in the evil alliance with it, appears the spiritual
power. To this, I especially wish to call attention,
this junction of despotism, all through Europe, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a
portentous feature of the.times. State is everywhere
the guardian of faith. Lord, ally, or servant of the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.            123
Church. This is true both of Protestant and Catholic
Europe. The Church, whether national or papal, is
in either case despotic, and the abettor and confederate of absolute power in the State. It is the instrument and accomplice of the throne, in a conspiracy
against the liberties of mankind; leaving no longer
hope in the separation and division of tyrannies.'I have said this was true in Protestant States, as
well as Catholic. In this, it is true, the Protestant
Church (so called) is in conflict with its vital principles; but it becomes none the less, to the extent of
its despotic practice, equally responsible for the disastrous consequences to faith, arising from the forceful repression or perturbation of the European mind,
and from placing Christianity in seeming antagonism
to liberty and progress.
It is spiritual despotism in alliance with civil, that
I wish to point at, as one great cause of the defection
of Christendom from Christianity in the eighteenth
century; and that, whether in Protestant or Catholic
States.  And if the mischiefs were less universal or
permanent in the former, than in the latter, it was
because despotic Protestantism was a solecism and
inconsistency, in itself; convulsed, rent and made
powerless often by its own antagonisms. Its lifeprinciples ever warred on its despotic practice, broke




124           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
the edge of its despotism while it survived, and were
destined finally to destroy it.
The Treaty of Westphalia made no provision for the
spiritual liberty of individuals. In that great settleinent of Europe in 1648, there is no recognition of
the right of private judgment.  Protestantism becomes a religio licita, a legitimated religion, in the
European family of States; that is all. The religious independency of nations, as between themselves, is guaranteed.  But this independency was
in effect only the equal religious absolutism of potentates; an equal license to crush down dissent in
their own realms, undisturbed by their neighbors.
No guard is taken for the spiritual liberties of the
subject. The millions were handed over to their
rulers, with slight exceptions, as mere dumb driven
cattle; to be coerced by pains and penalties, at
pleasure, into conformity with the creed and order
of their despots.
Thus everywhere the despotic State, by natural affinities, draws to itself the despotic Church. Secular
and spiritual tyrannies coalesce and conspire; and
they wield in execution of their mandate, vast
machine-like masses of military force; such as
Europe has never seen before, since the Roman
Empire.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.            125
To this baleful alliance and double pressure of
despotisms in the seventeenth century, made more
stifling still with the weight of a ponderous military
arm, is to a great extent attributable the religious
eclipse during the century that follows.
This result accrued in various ways. In the first
place, this double despotism turns the mind of the
world out of its regular and healthful course. To
the obstruction and repression of the human mind in
its ordinary and practical direction, in the seventeenth century, must be ascribed much of its wild,
erratic, revolutionary, often destructive, career in the
ages following. The despotisms, political and ecclesiastical, that towered above nations, forbade all
action, all speech, all question, and as far as possible,
all thought, implicating themselves. And as this
coyered both worlds, what was left? They ordained
themselves sacred, inviolate, forbidden themes. The
human mind might not look that way with question.
Around the throne and the altar, it was to prostrate
tiself, blind, and in silence. Of its great, immediate,
palpable, wrongs and rights, of the tyrannic organisms of society meeting it everywhere, of ecclesiastical or political institutions, of laws, parliaments,
estates, church liberties and reforms, church creeds
and rituals-of themes like these, it might not
breathe a free whisper; at least, all speech and




126          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
literature must keep so far aloof from the actual
world, as to avoid the jealous suspicions and espionage of the spiritual and secular tyrants of that world.
All thinking must pass the censorship of pope, prelate, monarch and premier. Theology and politics
became in. consequence, to a great extent, shut
against the human mind. The ideal and speculative
was the only field left open to it.  Into that it
plunged: the infinite abstract became its realm and
its laboratory.
iHence the wide severance soon exhibited between
the speculative and practical.  Men took their
revenge for the tyrannous restrictions thus enforced
on thought and speech within, by giving themselves
unbounded license beyond those restrictions. There
was none of the moderation and sobriety ever im+ressed on thought, by bringing its conclusions to
the-test of experiment, and into relation to the actual
world. 1Men plunged into wild and daring, fantastic
and impious vagaries of philosophy, utterly careless
because they were all mere speculative vagaries,
nothing more: it was all heat lightning; or at least,
thunder in mid-sky. Nobody could be hit; it never
touched the common earth or existent actual interests, and never was to do so. Thus mind entered
with reckless freedom into the realms of abstract
thought; none of the common healthful restrictions




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         127
of actuality or practicality limiting it. Literature
became in consequence conjectural, ideal, empirical,
all-questioning, all-daring.  Free thought left the
common earth to plunge into the dark deeps below,
or to soar into the mist and vapor above; till society
was all undermined beneath, and its sky was veiled
all over with subtle and fantastic cloud-work, ready
to turn to masses of storm on coming generations.
This was the first great mischief of those despotisms
-thisforcing the ]humvtan mind awayfrom its course;
driving it from affairs themselves which might have
moderated and regulated it, to the abstract principle
which lay at the basis of affairs, and with which,
because they were abstract, it was tempted to deal
with the wildest and most capricious license.
It is astonishing to observe, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, the portentous chasm which was
thus made to yawn between the speculative and the
actual world-a chasm it was to take the ruins of
European civilization, the wreck of its oldest monarchies, and the corpses of ten millions of men to fill
up. Yet men were never more unconscious of the
precipice to which society was brought.  They
seemed to have had no idea that the speculative
might ever attempt to become the practical; the
ideal, the real. Courtiers and monarchs, in Versailles
and Potsdam  and Vienna, mouthed of Cato and




128           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
tiarmodius and names of classic freedom and regicide heroism; even Frederick the Great, so called,
the most absolute and not least sagacious of the
tyrants or his time, could talk loftily of Brutus and
the king-killers, and vapor in heroic platitudes of'
democratic liberties and magnanimities; little thinking the earth could still breed democrats and assassins of kings. The infidel epigram flashed and hissed
amid the brilliant circles of Paris and Berlin and
Petersburgh, with utter thoughtlessness that those
glittering sparkles were setting the world on firewere igniting a magazine below altar and throne and
universal society. Speculations on the social contract were as carelessly embraced, and caricatures of
royal or hierarchical vice and folly, were as heartily
and as recklessly laughed at, as if they were theories
and picturings of the man in the moon. I need not
argue that such a state, of the public mind was favorable  to skepticism —it was skepticism; striking
through all the foundations of the actual world; yet
in the deeps, but soon to emerge to the surface of
affairs.
Now when we reflect on the mighty startle and
impulse given to the human mind by the achievements in science, art and discovery, and by the conflict of religious ideas, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; and that the world was just




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         129
emerging from the era of Luther and Calvin and
Zuingle, of Copernicus and Columbus, and the inventor of Strasburgh who wrought mightier than they
all; when we reflect that it was in such an age that
such an arrest was attempted of the human mind,
we shall not wonder at the terrible energy with
~which that mind was impelled into new and wild
ways; nor that driven from ecclesiastical and political reform, it should with terrible force address itself
to a revolution in the realm of philosophy-to the
questioning of first principles and to the destruction
and reconstruction of the foundations of all belief.
In short, across the current of the world's mind, thus
dashing down the rapids of the previous age, civil
and spiritual despotism threw their massive and
gloomy structures.  No wonder they caused an
overflow that flooded the whole earth; and that the
violence of the waters made them insinuate through
the deeps below, and fret against the foundation of
those structures, till they were all undermined, and
tottering over a hideous abyss.
This crushing repression was attempted on the
minds of Europe in all the eagerness and enthusiasm
of new light and liberty, and under the intensest stimulant of novel and startling ideas and discoveries.
Christendom had never known such an era; the
world seemed as a seething, molten world, in genetic
6*




130          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
agitation.  It was such a world, that was at once
overlaid by vast strata of adamantine despotisms.
No wonder the earthquake was bred in the deeps
and soon burst forth; that those strata were torn
asunder, and the infernal world seemed to yawn
under modern civilization.
But again, while this terrible despotism over the
society of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, was producing an impulse toward a profound and universal skepticism in the realm of philosophy, tending to propagate itself through all
thought and feeling, it was especially effectual to
generate unbelief in the realm of religion. It necessitated this first by its war on the right of pricvate jcdgYhent in matters of religion.  Despotism seated oil
the pontifical or on the royal and archiepiscopal
thrones of Europe, with steel-clad legions as its instrument, forbade the nations below to reason or judge
for themselves, on questions of religious faith. The
exercise of this right they pursued as high treason
against God and the king.  They pronounced it
liable to the extremest punishment of human power
and the pains of eternal damnation.  Each State
assumed to be responsible for the religious belief of
its subjects; and almost every State in Europe, Protestant or Catholic, in the seventeenth century,
established platforms of faith and worship for its




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         131
subjects, which it was bound to enforce at all
hazards. To wink at dissent, was a crime against
Heaven and the souls of men.  Princes also were
impelled the more strongly towards the enforcement
of religious uniformity, frolm the spectacle of the religious and civil wars of the previous age of the
Lutheran reform; a spectacle leading them to regard
religious uniformity as essential to national unity
and strength.  Everywhere they had seen, in that
intolerant period, theological dissensions fomented
and exasperated to civil wars.
From these and other causes, all over Christendom,
at this period, the potentates and prelates of Europe
present the nations with creeds; to deny which was
to bring on themn the secular as well as spiritual
sword; even to doubt which, exposed to the pains
of hell. In short they denied to individual man the
right of reasoning at all on what they had once
determined in spiritualities. The command to him
was simply, "[Believe;~ and believe as his masters
told him; and as often as they told him; and as fast
as they told him." Indeed -sometimes, as under
Henry VIII. of England, it was hard for the subject
to keep up with the swift-footed changing faith of
his tyrant. He might be burned for believing to
clay what he would have been hung for denying yesterday, and what he might be shot for doubting




132           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
to-morrow. Belief was regarded as being as facile
and reasonable an object of command, as paying a
tax, or putting on a uniform.
Such was the theory and practice of governments
towards religion, nearly all over Europe. But is it
not evident that such treatment as this of the human
mind, necessitates skepticism, as it regards the matter whereon it is so treated  that to attempt to guard
any article of belief by a despotism over thought,
must of necessity bring that article into doubt? You
compel the very distrust you would smother! Instead of securing uniformity of belief by suppressing
private judgment, it is clear, both in the light of fact
and philosophy, you make true belief impossible.
In the first place, as far as you can repress private
judgment, you take away the power of all belief.
Talk and argue as you please against the right of
private judgment, it is palpable, it is only through
its exercise you can believe anything. You may as
well require me to see without my own eyes, or hear
without my own ears, as to believe without my own
private judgment.
Dogmatic belief is no exception to this statement.
You believe on authority. You must first sit in judgment upon that very authority. Even in case of a
doctrine, received on the authority of the Scripture,
our private judgment must first admit that authority,




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          133
from examination of its authenticity, genuineness and
inspiration. The mind must exercise its freedom in
renouncing its freedom. It must use its right of
private judgment, to decide it has no right of private
judgment. To speak of belief then without private
judgment, is clearly absurd in the nature of things.
As it has been well said by Morell (532d page):
"' In matter of fact, private judgment must be exercised whether we will or not. We come into God's
world without any mark upon our spirits to tell us
where we are to find the truth; and it is equally a
matter of private opinion, whether we determine to
work out our own systems of religious belief for ourselves, or whether we determine to yield to the
authority of others. In short, if the validity of
reason be once destroyed, nothing, not even revelation (which must be received through its medium)
can save from universal skepticism."
It is evident then, a war on the right of private
judgment, is a war on all belief. As far as it is suc@essful, it must beget universal skepticism. The
more stringent and omnipresent the despotism, the
more terrible the destruction of genuine belief
among nations. Force may extort verbal profession,
and coerce a nominal uniformity; genuine, real
belief, it can no more produce than force can make
a proposition in geometry true or false, or alter the




134           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
science of optics. The submission of millions, or
their nominal assent, under the terror of force, cannot
prove a single truth, or make a single believer,
throughout all generations. Belief has its own laws
and conditions, as much as electricity; its necessary
precedent, law and condition, is that of perceived
evidence; it is impossible it should come without this.
Force has nothing at all to do with it. It is utterly
and eternally alien from it: not by the breadth of
worlds, but by the difference of nature and being;
it is of another universe. Force may produce hypocrisy, or a sham and semblant faith, and these by the
loathing reaction they provoke, and by the general
distrust they breed, become a prolific source of skepticism; both in the individual conscious of the falsehood, and in observers. This has ever been one of
the curses of a hollow faith, and of a tyrannous
church. They discredit all genuine belief; and
smite the earth with the plague of universal distrust.
In the second place, war on the right of private
judgment enfeebles belief, where it does not destroy
it. Belief will be impotent or will have the mastery
of the soul, just in proportion-as the mind is conscious
of having in some form used its own private judgment, i. e. its own reason, in the matter. Hlence
tempted restriction on this right afflicts nations with
feebleness or paralysis of faith; which thus becomes




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           135
inadequate to resist any strong or subtle attacks, and
is ever ready in the hour of trial to pass to doubt
or a negation of all belief. Such faith is faith without courage or armor, yea, faith without substance at
all; a mere shadowy, empty form.
Thus spiritual despotism, when the pressure of fear
is removed, is ever the prolific parent of infidelity.
And thus, in the ages of which we speak, it is
evident, independent of the subsequent melancholy
testimony of history, that despotism must have prepared a general era of unbelief, by making, when
completely successful, genuine faith impossible; and
by rendering, when it was partially so, all belief
timid, distrustful, feeble, and incapable of resistance
to the epidemic temptations and passions of the age.
Indeed, I am sure I need not argue this point here.
Deny to -us the right of private judgment, and we
have no judgment at all; mere negation, no belief,
no faith, are all that is left us.
I cannot sufficiently express my detestation of a
dfctrine that thus strips man of humanity. Renounce my right of private judgment and that in
matters of religion! What is it but to renounce my
intellectual personality!-my moral manhood!-my
very spiritual identity!-to abdicate the prime prerogative of my eternal soul! Such a war as we have
described, waged by spiritual despotism on this right,




136           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
could only darken nations; leave them to grope on
their gloomy way without knowledge or manhood;
and with no principles to withstand the sophisms of
the caviller, or to rebuild their religious belief when
superstitions and falsities had been rent away. Just
as in historic fact, the nations of central Europe were
left, when, under the attacks of the new and daring
skeptical philosophy, the faith of kingdoms seemed
almost to fail at once. This is the second great mischief of despotism. For fear of obliquity of vision
it puts the world's eyes out. In stifling reason it
smothers belief. Thus despots that exulted in thinking to exterminate heresies with the sword, found
soon they had been striking at faith itself. Thinking
to extirpate a cancer, they had stabbed the heart of
religion itself, and lo! as in a moment, it seemed to
go down to the grave.
But sad as are the above consequences of religious
tyranny on the faith of nations, its first and deadliest
mischiefs are inflicted on the Spiritual Power itseyf
-the Church; which is both its instrument and its
victim. Let us then, in tracing the consequences of
despotism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, look first at its effects here. We shall find it,
whichever way we look, a Devil whose name is
Legion.
And first, such despotism as above delineated,




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          137
must emasculate and disarm the natural champions
of religious faith among a people. It must breed
in a church a logical imbecility and cowardice, an
illiterateness and indolence, that shall make it incompetent to defend Christianity against its assailants;
and when the enemy shall come in like a flood, there:shall be none to lift up a banner against him. Thus
it will produce infidelity, through intellectual imbecility in the spiritual order. Despotism effects
this imbecility variously. First.-Its war on private
judgment necessarily makes the faith of the spiritual
order itself, as well as that of nations, feeble, ignorant
and timid, as shown above. Second.-It takes away
from churchmen the necessity of, and incentives
to, intellectual culture and discipline, and induces a
haughty indolence and arrogant security.-" What is
the use or demand for argument and erudition, when
simple authority and mere force can settle everything
so much more summarily and unanswerably? Why
vex my brains and disturb a luxurious ease to discov&r and arrange historical, philological or philosophical evidence to confute the misbeliever, when a
brief dash of the pen to the magistrate or the official
of the Holy Office, answers every purpose just as
well?  Yea, may be the more effectual to the saving
of his soul, by bringing him more promptly to a
sense of the evil of his ways. Certainly it is easier




138          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
to imprison a man than to answer his arguments;to burn or behead him, a prompter process than to
refute him; besides, it is a readier way of soothing
our wounded vanity or avenging an affront to our
intellectual pride. Why take the trouble to gore a
man with the horns of an intellectual dilemma, when
you can impale his body at once on the stake? Why
rack him with logical torture, when you can break
him alive on the wheel? Why weary yourself with
philosophies and philologies and the labor of reasoning, when the thumbscrew, the scourge, the shears,
and the glowing brand, shall show the miscreant
misbeliever he is in an evil case, so much the
quicker?"
Nothing sooner enervates the intellect or dwarfs
the erudition of the champions of the Church, than
the conscious possession of arbitrary and absolute
power.-"Why  strengthen myself with learned
authorities, when I have a hundred thousand men to
back me? Why attempt to quench heresy by argument, when I may at once snuff it out in blood?
Let dissent fret itself as irt may, shall it trouble me in
the awful sanctuary of my palace and behind my
rampart of fortresses and standing armies? Shall I
bother myself with their impudent' logical points?'
Why, I have half a million of steel ones, comprehensible by the most asinine obstinacy! They refuse




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           139
authority?-they want light, do they?  The stupid
reprobates! A little earthly flame, that shall give
them a foretaste of the eternal illumination, shall dispel the darkness of their minds wonderfully."-Now
nothing tends so much to indolence and an enervating security as this conscious power of the summary
processes of force.
Nothing again is more fatal to truly liberal learning and intellectual vigor, than the feeling that you
are subjected to such Power; the consciousness of the
duty and necessity of the implicit submission of faith
and life to the enactments of mere unreasoning
authority. The conscientious or indolent disuse of
your own reason from causes above enumerated,
must of itself superinduce feebleness and paralysis
of it, and an indisposition to its exercise. But when
that exercise becomes nugatory, how few will resort
to it! Why plague yourself, you will reason, with
patient and weary study, when you know the ultimate fruit and result of all your toil-be it never so
longl'is here readily furnished, in dogmas you are
determined at last to receive; yea, which you know
you mutst receive u-quzestioning, or be damned for
both worlds.
Why afflict myself with reasoning, when reasoning
cannot at all alter my conclusions, but can only
tempt me to eternal perdition?  Why annoy my




140          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
head with sciences when an infallible, absolute
authority has already established its unalterable ordinances for all science, physical or metaphysical,
mathematical or moral?  What availed optics,
mechanics and geometry, against cardinals and
schoolmen, to the poor wretches relying on such
delusions of Satan? What had they done for Galileo, but to snare him into the wrath of God and the
Church? What if they did prove that the earth
moved round the Sun   Could the earth move contrary to the decisions of the pontiff?  Was not the
Copernican system a heresy? Was not that enough?
Why tempt the mind with scientific demonstrations,
which you know beforehand are but the illusions of
the Devil? And as for the power of the confutation
of heretics, what need of learning or argument for
that?  Had not a short-hand method been taken
effectually to bring Galileo to his senses, and stop
his accursed tongue and the impious movement of
the earth against papal ordinance, at once? Such
would naturally be the reasoning of a minister and
disciple of spiritual despotism.
It is obvious such despotism must have discouraged science-made logic superfluous, and taken
away from the spiritual order all the common
premiums of successful learning and independent
thought. Could the mind gather strength or bold



SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          141
ness of wing, while fluttering for ever in the cage of
an iron, changeless, ecclesiastic system, or struggling
in the meshes and convolutions of Aristotelian subtleties — or achieve comprehensiveness- of range,
while working a scholastic treadmill or gyrating like
a tethered beast, round the fixture of some pontific
decretal?
History does not leave us to mere inferences on
these points.  The disastrous influence of spiritual
despotism of all kinds on the intellectual power of
its ministry, is abundantly attested by facts. That
of Rome on the ministers of her communion, was
quickly apparent in contrast with nations of the
opposite party, after the Reformation, and is gloomily
apparent this hour; shading with deeper coloring
the countries of her dominion, on the map of the
world.  The history of Ecclesiastical Literature for
the last three centuries, in Spain, France, Italy and
Germany, is fall of melancholy proofs of this comparative deterioration and imbecility.  At present I
refer.you only to the French church, after the expulsion of the Huguenots had taken away the stimulus
of rivalry, and the necessity of self defensive effort.
The security, relaxation, and haughty indolence of
absolute power, ensued. The consequence was, that
when the awful exigency of the eighteenth century
came upon her, and the wheel and stake and Bastille




142          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
could no longer silence the voice of thought, nor
pontifical authority nor decrees of the Sorbonne
could settle all questions of science and theology, the
French ch-hrch seemed utterly imbecile, and almost
without a struggle troddon down in the dust by the
new philosophy.  The French church was dumb
before its foes. Religion, in its evil hour, had no
defenders. Says Macaulay, " Everything gave way
to the activity and zeal of the new reformers. In
France every man distinguished in letters was found
in their ranks. Every year gave birth to works in
which the fundamental doctrines of the Church were
attacked with argument, invective and ridicule.
The Church made no defence, except by acts of
power.  Censures were pronounced, editions were
seized, insults offered to the remains of infidel
writers; but no Bossuet nor Pascal came forth to
encounter Voltaire.  There appeared not a single
defence of the Catholic doctrine which produced any
considerable effect, or which is now remembered.
A bloody, unsparing persecution, like that which put
down the Albigenses, might have put down the philosophers.  But the time for De Mlontforts and
Dominics had gone by. The punishments which the
priests were still able to inflict, were sufficient to
irritate, but not sufficient to destroy.  Orthodoxy
soon became the badge of ignorance and stupidity."




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           143
Can we wonder, Christianity being left exclusively
with such defenders, that infidelity had its own way
with everything?
Thus despotism prepares for infidelity by intellectually enfeebling and disarming the Church.




144             CAUSES OF INFIDELiTY.
CHAPTER VI.
SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.
Despotism Corrupts the Spiritual Power, through Hierarchy, Confessional, Celibacy, Separation of Power from the People; Peculiar
Corruptions of Politico-Ecclesiastical Despotism, especially around
the Thrones of Central Europe, in the 17th and 18th centuries —
Cardinal Dubois-Regent of Orleans-Louis 15th-Christianity
made a Religion of Force-Terrible pressure of Spiritual Despotism
the precedent ages-Reaction as the Force applied —England and
in France compared-Christianity hated of the Nations as the ally
of Secular Tyranny-Infidelity from Superstition —from Infallibility. Essential and immortal malignancy of Spiritual Despotism.
WE have thus far seen despotism  destroying faith
by its war on human reason and ecclesiastic culture. A deadlier aspect of the same evil cause now
engages us. Despotism again, breeds unbelief, inasmuch as it corrupts, while it darkens and emasculates
the spiritual power. Thus, spiritual despotism in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced infidelity, not only by mental feebleness, indolence,
illiterateness in the clergy (the natural defenders of
Christianity), but also still more, by  generating
among them  a corruyption of morals tending to repel
mankind from the religion they profess to represent.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           145
Despotism ever fouls its own instruments. Spiritual
despotism does this by the relations it establishes
between the grades of the hierarchy, and between
the hierarchy and the people. First the intercourse
of the different orders of the clergy with each other
and with the laity, an intercourse of absolute authority on the one hand, with implicit obedience and
servility on the other, can hardly fail to be mischievous to the morals of both; producing the vices of
intolerance, ambition, arrogance, in the one relation,
offset against those of abject obsequiousness, liphomage and duplicity on the other. This is the fatal
vice of absolute power. It is a double-edged curse,
deadly alike to its possessor and its object. Like a
cancer or conflagration, it consumes both ways, above
and below. Add now to the influences springing
from these relations of'power, the peculiar institution for the em~ployment of them, found in the
Romish church, that most complete instrument for
spiritual subjugation, which despotism ever invented,
and at the same time the most cunning device for
corrzcting Church and society ever born of infernal
guile, the confessional! —remember, moreover, that
this institute was by the same despotism conjoined
with an enforced celibacy of its ministers, and we
shall not wonder at the corruption of the clergy in
the Romish church in the centulies we are investi7




146          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
gating! Indeed, the confessional is another doubleedge curse; worked according to prescribed rule and
question, stirring up the mind of both questioner and
questioned perpetually to thoughts of evil, and pouring through the clerical mind the moral filth of
Christendom! I do not see how such an institution,
so administered, connected with the causes above
mentioned, could fail to defile the purest order of
men on earth.
Again, despotism ever tends to corrupt its minisisters, inasmuch as they hold office and power from
above, and do not feel amenable to the common conscience and reason of mankind. They hold their
position of the central despotism; which may perhaps be as often propitiated by vices as by virtues;
especially if connected with that merit (countervailing in despotic administration all faults), viz. subserviency and devotion to itself. 3MIoreover, it is the
law of power in this world of ours, that in order to
keep it pure, it must be in constant commerce with
the great heart of humanity. Its virtue, Antaeus like,
must often, for its reinvigoration, touch the common
earth. It must feel the heart-beat of the millions
below; the pulsation of the immortal instincts of the
human conscience and reason, that though often
smothered, blinded, dumb, still never die; but which
are born fresh with fresh human souls, in each was




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           147
generation. Authority needs to feel that it is amenable to the public judgment of mankind, and must
plead at the bar of public opinion.' Cut off the brain
from the heart, and insanity and death ensue. But
this was the position of the spiritual power, in those
centuries, in all Catholic, and'much of Protestant:Europe. Its ministers and minions held of hierarchs
and kings only. They were cut off from the great
heart of the world.
But corrupting as are all despotisms, most corrupting of all forms of them is the politico-ecclesiastical
type, that associates itself so extensively with the
religious history of modern Europe. This type has
its peculiar viciousness, first, in the fact that it
usually pours the coffers of the State upon the
Church, and crushes spiritual life under State endowments.  It smothers ecclesiastic virtue under a cloth
of gold. The revenues of the French church for instance, before the Revolution, from  tithes alone,
amounting to one hundred and thirty millions of
franc per annum, in addition to other numerous
incomes, and those from ecclesiastical domains,
(amounting to about one third of the entire soil of
France)-such a revenue, guaranteed and sacred to
it, utterly independent of the public reason and conscience of the nation, were enough, combined with




148           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
the other causes, to ensure the corruption of any
Church in the world.
A second cause of the peculiar viciousness of this
type of despotism is found in the fact, that all subjects of the monarchy are of course members of the
Church. The distinction between the Church and
the world, is thus obliterated; both practically, and
in public idea; and the nation with all its crimes,
ignorance, and vices, is at once imported within the
pale of the spiritual communion. We need not argue
such an importation must corrupt the spiritual body
that incorporates it.  Indeed  the very  idea of
religion is vitiated, if not destroyed, by it. Its moral
tone must be relaxed and the standard of ecclesiastic
virtue and morals universally lowered.
Another cause of infidelity in politico-ecclesiastical despotism, is found in the fact that the secular as
well as the spiritual tyranny, is to be propitiated by
churchmen; and that too by gratifications and flatteries addressed to the crimes and vices often of
kings as well as hierarchs; and that political as well
as ecclesiastical gifts and honors, are the bribes
offered to the clerical order, for such gratifications
and flatteries. Now, in addition to all the causes
enumerated above, as vitiating the Church in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, let all the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          149
emoluments and offices of State and the objects of
courtly cabal and faction, be thrown forward as
prizes of clerical ambition and intrigue; —prizes to
be sought amid the scenes and circles that surrounded the thrones of Central Europe in those ages; amid
the bloody debauch of the Valois, and the putrid
dissoluteness of the Bourbons; the hollow and prudish
corruptions of the court of Louis XIV.; the shameless
and unspeakable orgies of the regency, and the foul
seraglio of Louis XV. Let Churchmene be obliged
to jostle amid the roues, debauchees, ruffians and
minions of the palace! to caress the bloody lingers
of a Cathirine de Medici! cater to the lusts of a
Philip of Orleans, or Louis XV.! flatter a Pompadour and sue for a smile of the infamous Du Barri;
to plot and purchase and slime their way to greatness
through scenes and means like these, and we are not
astonished that there issues forth some strange,
portentous product of evil.  Even cardinals like
Rohan and Dubois, cease to be monsters mid the
creations of such a system. Such fruit grows naturally of such roots. Nor can we wonder when we
see a Church in the embrace of such despotism, civil
and spiritual, filling Ecrope with infidelity by the
spectacle of its corruptions.
We bring the charge, then, against spiritual despotism wedded to political-of making the eighteenth




150           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
century infidel by the corruptions it had wrought in
the Church. It had corrupted it, by the relations of
power and servility it established between the different ranks of the hierarchy, and between them and
the laity. It had corrupted it by the double curse
of the confessional, growing out of those relations
conjoined with an enforced celibate of ecclesiastics
and devotees. It had corrupted the Church, by
smothering ecclesiastic virtue under State endowments and sinecures, by incorporating the world with
the Church and thus obliterating religious distinctions, and consequently the religious sense in society;
and by mingling up  ecclesiastics with  all the
intrigues, ambitions, cabals, and dissoluteness of regal
courts, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, in Europe. I need not argue that despotism in corrupting the Church, of necessity made the
nation infidel. The avenue from ecclesiastical corruption to unbelief, yawns ever open and wide as
the gates of hell.
A tyrannous church my mind feels cannot be from
a true God. A  corrupt one, it knows cannot be.
There is no surer way of producing infidelity, than
by arraying a man's natural conscience against his
-faith. The God and Father of his conscience, must
be a God of spotless purity. Such also must be the
religion emanating from him. A religion that comes




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           151
burdened and foul with crimes, bringing its appeal
to the tribunal of the reason and conscience, is certain, unless reason and conscience are besotted and
blinded by ages of abuse, to be driven away, ignominiously rejected from that tribunal. The most
terrible fountain of infidelity in all times, is a godless church.  A religion coming before me with
hands dyed in human gore, with stains of lust and
gluttony all over its garments, and claiming as God's
vicegerent to master my conscience and bind my
reason and muzzle my speech, I turn away from in
more than incredulity, I hate-more, I loathe, I
abhor it. But such was the aspect presented before
the French nation by the professed representative of
Christianity in the midst of the eighteenth century.
The cor:ruptions of the French church were, during
this period, unspeakably hideous. Crimes beyond
nature stained the robes of its prelates; and all the
crimes of common nature showed themselves with
unblushing effrontery within the chancel and the
oratory!
All the sacred names of offices most holy in the
Romish church, appear in the foulest association on
the sin-bleared, blood-blotted record of those times.
Abb6s, curates, priests, Jesuits, bishops, archbishops and even cardinals, are presented, in the
perspective of those ages, mingled up with sins and




152          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
shames whose very hideousness protects them from
the vengeance of history, and permits in this place
only an-allusion. Nor do the meshes of intrigue,
simony, and sensuality that involve such personages,
isolate them: they embrace the whole French
church; and with it, their web implicates, also,
Rome, the pontiff, and the Romish world. This
corruption goes far back, mingling ecclesiastics with
the perjury and lusts, assassinations and massacre of
the latter Valois. It is somewhat gilded over with
a hollow, hypocritical propriety, during the latter
years of Louis XIV.! though even then the splendor
of Bossuet, and the purity and genius of Fen6lon and
Pascal, could not cover it from the sneers of the court
and nation. But in the unspeakable orgies of the
Regent, Philip of Orleans, who succeeded him,
revenge was taken for all past restraints and compulsory proprieties, and no terms were kept longer
with the moral sense of mankind. In them, a cardinal-one of the highest and most sacred dignitaries
of the Romish church-of rank second only to the
pope-a cardinal~ appears as prime minister, buffoon
and pander of the horrid debauch; its chief figure,
beside the foul and blasphemous Regent himself, sits
Cardicnal Dubois, amid scenes rivalled only by those
for which God blotted out ancient Sodom.' All that
we read," says Alison, " in ancient historians, veiled




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          153
in the decent obscurities of a learned language, of
the orgies of ancient Babylon, was equalled if not
exceeded, by the nocturnal revels of the Regent, the
Cardinal Dubois, and his licentious associates." They
would exceed belief, if not narrated by the testimony
of concurring eye-witnesses. To such a length did
the license go, that the young Duchess De Berrithe beautiful daughter of the prince of that name,
one of the noblest of France —assisted at his nocturnal revels, with his mistresses and opera dancers;
and even with two of the fairest of the troop occasionally personated the three goddesses who contested the prize of beauty before the son of Prianm! and
in the costume too of the fable.
The Duc St. Simon, an eye-witness, in his annals,
gives us sketches of these scenes. But those sketches
only hint at what even the French courtier of the
court of the Regent and Louis XV., blushes more
fully to reveal. Even those sketches I dare not translate before you, nor dare I quote from authorities
everywhere accessible.
Nor are these scenes in the history of IDubois
alien from the rest of his life. His vices were notorious before he became cardinal; were the scandal
of the French capital when he was a simple abbe'.
Spite of all these, and persevering in them all, he
rises to the highest honors in the French church, and




154          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
next to the highest in the Romish world. He is made
Archbishop of Cambray! President of the assembly
of the French church! Finally, through bribery, intrigue, and corrupt influences implicating the Romish
world-extending from the supreme pontiff, to our
astonishment, to such pure names as that of Massillon
— through means like these, finally he is cardinal /
Crowned, robed, consecrated, with the anointing of
the sacred oil, with the investiture in Heaven's pure
white!-the foul wretch leprous all over with sin!
consecrated by the laying on of holy lands! and the
sign of the blessed cross! and the invocation of the
Holy Spirit! and the awful names of the Father, the
Son and the Holy Ghost! consecrated, in the presence of hierarchs and princes! amid the solemnly
sworn teachers and guardians of our holy religion,
and in the delegated and constructive presence of
the High Priest of Catholic Christendom! consecrated
a Cardinal Biskop of the Romi sh world!!//     Such a
consecration! Need wev ask what made France and
the world infidel?  Such a consecration! It were
enough to send a hoot through Pandemonium. A
consecration like this might smite a century with
infidelity.
True, all cardinals were not like the hideous
Dubois;-nor were they ostentatious libertines and
voluiptuaries, like Rohan; nor were all archbishops




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          155
like the scandalous Archbishop of Arles, or the infamous Bishop of Sisteron, or like the intriguant and
infidel Bishops Bissy, Tencin, and Tressan, or like
the Bishop of Tours, of whom the witty Richelieu
says,'"He ought to have been bishop of but one
city, which should have been resuscitated for hin —
and that was Sodom." Nor were all nuncios like thle
licentious and brutal Bentevoglio. But still, though
for the honor of human nature, we cannot regard
them as universally representative of the French
church, is not their case fearfully significant of the
character of the leaders in it? — significant of the standard of the morals of that Church in which such
monsters were not even strange examples, and
where their appalling vices were no impediment in
the attainment of the highest ecclesiastic preferments,
and offices of the most awful sanctity? And what
but skepticism and irreligion could spring up in the
shadow of such a Church?  A glance at it might
suffice to answer our whole inquiry; presenting us
with-the incredible scandals connected with ecclesiastic history in that capital, which was at the same
time the focus of infidelity and of European civilization. Nor could the manners of the Church have
been amended under the successor to the Regent-a
Church draggling its lawn and purple, as the French
church was compelled to do, through the filth that




156           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
surrounded the throne of Louis XV. with his seraglio
of Vallieres, Pompadours, and Du Barr6s; and the
unspeakable infamies of "Pare aux Cerfs!" —infamies rendering credible what ancient history tells us
of the manners of the courts of the Seleucidae and
the Ptolemies, and of the tyrants of the Roman
world: but infamies, even foul as they were, surpassed by those of the royal cousin, the Duke De
Chartres, whose unnatural crimes, infamous even in
those foul ages, have come down to us rather as a
hideous whisper of tradition, a rumor shuddering
through the last age, than in open historic record;
because letters shrank abhorringly from the task of
chronicling them. You will pardon me, I am sure,
for not attempting to follow out more minutely in
offensive detail, the ecclesiastic corruption that mingles with the stygian flood of national immorality
and irreligion, flowing under the throne of the later
Bourbons.
When the historian tells us that toward the latter
part of the reign of Louis XV., " no one but the
king, and the dauphin, and dauphiness evinced any
respect for religion," we are not surprised.  We
should suppose one such specimen of a professed
believer as Louis XV. was enough; as much as one
age could bear! One such as this most Ckristian
Majesty! himself a hoary-sensualist, "praying," as




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         157
Alison tells us, in the intervals of debauch with the
youthful victims of his harem, " that Heaven might
preserve their orthodox principles," and, in consequence of the numbers of these victims, which, enticed
to the recesses of his seraglio, mysteriously disappeared from society, suspected by the horror-struck
multitude of attempting to reinvigorate his exhausted
age with a bath of human blood! One such specimen of a believer as this sick monarch, dying in full
odor of orthodoxy, and in the peace of the Church,
partaking of the holy communion, with mistresses of
his lusts around his dying bed hardly yielding place
to the administration of the awfill sacrament; then
buried as his most CGhristian llfaesty, and panegyrized by an Abbe St. Maury with funeral eulogy, as
if a confessor and exemplar of saintly virtues! One
such example were enough to make the faith of a
world retch! were enough to destroy all respect for
the religion represented by such a Church, and to
fill a realm with infidelity. One such specimen of a
respecter of Christianity, all that the kingdom presented! Very probably! A corrupt kingdom might
well shrink away from beside him, and leave him
alone on the platform of faith he professed to occupy;
in horror at his mightier foulness, and in terror lest
the bolts of outraged Heaven that should strike the
monster, should smite all that stood with him.




158           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Surely a place beside Louis XV. could hardly be one
of safety, if so be there was a God, and that God
could ever be angry. The faith and Christianity of
Louis, XV.! It is more than ridiculous, it is horrible!
The sacrilegious blending of pietism with brutal sensualism in his history, appals us more than the open,
sneering, Heaven-daring atheism of the Regent.  It
breeds infidelity, too, more surely. The world cannot
believe in a religion or a Church that fellowships
such scoundrels.  They will not believe in God or
a divine justice if its bolts strike not such examples,
nor in a Hell if it be not stirred from beneath in all
its depths to meet such monsters at their coming?
Despotism, again, possessing the Church, must produce unbelief, in destroying the intellectual and
moral prestige of Christianity as being a religion of
superior reason, and logic, and liberty, and love. As
such it came at first to humanity; a kingdom of
truth, and relying on truth alone. as its armor'and
strength. But spiritual despotism makes Christianity
abandon this vantage ground, and descend to the level
of falsehoods. It presents it before the world as a
religion of force, tyrannic repression and cruelty.
But it is suicidal for a power properly, purely ideal,
to renounce its natural prerogative of reason and
conscience, and assume that of brute violence. A
religious faith shrinking from the ground of free




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          159
inquiry and pure logic, compels men to doubt. They
will resent and resist coercion attempted in its name,
as an absurdity in itself as well as an outrage on the
conscious rights of the human soul.  A  Church
employing it, they regard with distrust and hate, as
abdicating its legitimacy, and becoming a tyranny.
A system of truth, they will reason, would have no
need to resort to force, no disposition to do it. Thus
truth itself will be.dishonored and discredited by an
enforcement requisite only for a lie. Men will reject
it in scorn and hate, and indignation, as obviously not
of a God of reason, liberty and love.
Such were the fatal lessons of unbelief and hate
which ecclesiastic despotism had for ages been teaching the nations of Europe. The time at last came
when these lessons were to bear their ruinous fruit.
The ultimate reaction was, we can clearly see, obviously destined to be terrible in proportion to the
pressure that had borne down the human mind.
Sooner or later must come the rebound. That mind
under the long consciousness of outrage, must in the
fullness of time rise in indignant unbelief, on the
power that oppresses it, and its revenge must be terrible. The loathed and detested Church and everything associated with it, it will cast away in the day
of its fierce wrath; and alas, as that Church is all
the millions know of Christianity, they will cast away




160-          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
that too. The day at last came, and one wild cry of
derision and rage, " an absurdity, a tyranny, a sham,
a lie," rang from one end of Europe to the other, as
the wizzened hag, bedizened over with the purple
and scarlet of its ages of harlotry, was dragged by
the infuriate million to the guillotine.  The consciousness of ages of wrong, of attempted murder or
enslavement of the human reason, of ages of blindness, darkness, agony and chains, was burning at the
heart of nations, and they rose at last on Christianity
itself in blind, frantic rage, with the battle-cry of
" crush the wretch."
Thus despotism begat infidelity, by destroying the
moral prestige of Christianity, and producing against
it a tremendous reaction of the mind of the world.
The reaction, as we have stated, was not unnaturally
as the force applied; the atrocities and extravagances of insurrection, in proportion to the stringency
of the precedent despotism. The results, hideous as
they were, do not surprise us, if we measure our
anticipations by this principle. The pressure of
spiritual or rather Papal despotism, from the eleventh
to the fourteenth century, was unspeakable. It is
thus fully but truly described by Isaac Taylor in his
work on Spiritual Despotism.  " The power of the
Church as keeper of Truth, and guardian of morals,
and disposer of souls, embraced everything, provided




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         161
for everything, and applied itself to the entire surface
of human nature and of the social system. This despotism was at once spiritual and political, visible and
invisible. Nothing could be more refined, nothing
more substantial. In the highest sense which the
terms admit, the Romish tyranny was absolute and
universal.  Men could not think or inquire even,
concerning the processes of the material world and
the laws of matter and motion, without treading
upon ground which the Church had preoccupied.
All philosophy was either heterodox or orthodox, and
a man might be burned for an opinion in mechanics
as. well as an opinion in theology. There could be
no acquisition or enjoyment of the goods of life, no
marrying or inheriting, no devising, no ruling, no
judging, no speaking, no feeling, no thinking, there
could he no dying without the leave of the Church,
or apart from its favor." Now let such a tremendous despotism as this (the voluminous historical
memorials of which are thus summed up) be
applied to society for ages, as was this, though
latterly somewhat broken down, to the sixteenth
century, and what a terrible history is epitomized in
the logic of that one fact;-w-hat woful, wrathful,
manacled ages it drags along in the chain of its dire
necessity! And is it not evident one of three results
will take place? Either the mind of nations will be




162            CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
crushed into imbecility, stupor and despair (as in the
case of Spain), or resisting, it will protest against the
abuses perpetrated, and will resist in the name of
religious reform (as in Protestant Europe), or unable
to distinguish Christianity from its abuses, it will be
driven to reject religion altogether (as e. g. in France),
and the passionateness of either the reform or rejection of Christianity, will be in the ratio of the stringency and pressure of the previous despotism. As
spiritual despotism had chained all science, all
society, all civilization, and all humanity, it is no
wonder all science, society, humanity and civilization, became infidel.  Action and reaction were
equal by the law of moral dynamics.  Imagine such
a pressure, age after age, bearing down without
remission or relief; every interest, crushed; each
breathing space, closed; the clutch of tyranny ever
remorselessly tightening upon its victim; the soul of
the world like the terrible agent pent up in the
steam-engine, prisoned under ever-narrowing compress of clamp and rivet and band;-when it bursts
that compress, as burst it surely will, who shall
measure the ruinous passion  and  power of its
rebound?
You will see all these principles and the multiform
evils of spiritual despotism, verified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of European history.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         163
In what countries e. g. in Europe was it, that the
transition and revolutionary periods in religion and
philosophy passed with the least injury to Faith?
Was it not England? that country where imperfect
as her toleration was, the right of private judgment
had been most asserted and vindicated, and the
power of spiritual despotism  most broken.  The
storm of infidel philosophy and sentiment beat upon
her as upon France, but she stood like her own
island, steadfast, amid the floods, while her neighbor
on the continent seemed utterly wrecked. Why the
difference? The exercise of the right of private
judgment professed by Protestantism, and to some
extent accorded to the English nation, together with
the open Bible, had in a measure educated the
national mind. It could see a Christianity beyond
the Chiurch, and did not identify the religion of
Jesus with the corruption and tyranny, the absurdities and falsehoods of the spiritual power. Discussion, to some extent free, had been a conductor to
disar~i the storm; nor had the common mind such
grievous wrongs to resent as in the neighboring
kingdom. No religious massacres, no edicts of the
exile of millions of Huguenots, had driven from her
realm the confessors and principles of Church reform
and spiritual freedom; leaving her to meet the storm
of infidel Revolution without intelligence or piety to
withstand its violence, or ability to construct a




164          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Christian and permanent order from the ruin. No
confounding, in the popular mind, of Christianity
with tyranny, had'made her millions frantic with rage
against religion itself, and converted her revolutions into a blasphemous insurrection against God.
"When the enemy came in like a flood" on the
British Isles, the Spirit of the Lord, through champions disciplined in the school of Protestantism to
vigorous, manly, Christian reason, lifted up a standard against it.  A  Chillingworth, a Barrow, a
Tillotson and Leighton, an Owen, a Clark, and Baxter,
a Howe, a Wilberforce, Whitfield, Wesley, Butler,
and their compeers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, rallied round the ark of English Faith
during this perilous era, and bore it up.
Protestant England had not been free from wrongs
against the right of private judgment. We forget
not the Bonners, and Lauds, and Tudors, and Stuarts,
and her crimson statute book bristling with acts of
uniformity, nor her dark record of religious murders, and imprisonments, and exiles. But she had
offended least, certainly had been least successful amid modern nations in attempts at the suppression of the right of private judgment; and she alone
stood erect in the revolutionary storm.  She had
had no dragoonades, no St. Bartholomews, and she
had no 2d of September.
In France, contrawise, spiritual despotism  had




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         165
been seemingly completely successful in crushing
down or expelling the elements of religious liberty
and reform; had taken away the Scripture, exiled
millions of Iuguenots, imprisoned and silenced the
Jansenists, and enchained and blinded the popular
mind; consequently, she had no champions to stand
by and defend Christianity against the floods of
atheistic impiety that overwhelmed her.
To the awakened national mind, to Voltaire,
Rousseau and the Encyclopedists, she had nothing
to present but a Church that warred on enlightenment, on science, on the instinctive sentiment of
rights in the soul: of man, and in whose skirts was
found the righteous blood of the confessors and martyrs of ages; a Church, which, incapable of repen.
tance, brought its puerile superstitions and its cruel
intolerance down into the civilization of the close of
the eighteenth century. We do not excuse, and
yet we do not so much wonder at infidelity and rage
towards Christianity in a people, and amid philosopher& knowing of Christianity only the French
church of the last century. Nature, yea, the very
principles of Christianity taught them to hate that
hollow sham and monstrous caricature that abused
its name.
Indeed the philosophers-Voltaire and his compeers, had the secret of their strength in Christian




166          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
truths mingled with their errors, and truths which
were valid against that Church which they mistook
for Christianity.  It has been truly said of them,
"They were men who with all their faults, moral
and intellectual, thus made manifest war on what
they considered as abuses, whose blood boiled at the
sight of cruelty and injustice, and who on many
occasions placed themselves between the powerful
and the oppressed, and while exhibiting an irrational
and disgraceful rancor towards Christianity, yet
had in a far greater measure than their opponents,
that charity towards all classes and races, which
Christianity enjoins. Religious persecutions, judicial
torture, arbitrary imprisonment, slavery and the
slave-trade, were the constant subjects of their lively
satire and eloquent disquisitions. When an innocent
man was broken on the wheel at Toulouse-when a
youth guilty only of an indiscretion, was burned at
Abbeville, a voice went forth from Lake Leman
which made itself heard from Moscow to Cadiz, and
which sentenced the unjust judges to the contempt
and detestation of Europe.  The really efficient
weapons with which the philosophers assailed the
evangelical faith were borrowed from the evangelical morality. On the one side was a Church boasting a purity of doctrine direct from the apostles, but
disgraced by the massacre of St. Bartholomew's, the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.         167
murder of the best of the kings, the war of the
Cevennes and the destruction of Port Royal. On
the other side was a sect laughing at the Scriptures,
shooting out the tongue at the Sacraments; but ready
to encounter principalities and powers in the cause
of justice, mercy and toleration." Such a combination and antagonism could not fail to be most disastrous both to religion and humanity, both to faith
and liberty. When Christianity ceased to be the
champion of justice and mercy, and to lead on
reform in its attacks on the sins of the times, faith
perished. But without faith, humanity could not
live long, and reform became of necessity the genius
of ruin.
The last that we shall notice, and one of the deadliest crimes of spiritual despotism against both God
and man, was its placing Christianity in antagonism
to human liberty, and presenting her to the mind of
nations as their oppressor. Terrible was the wrong
thus wrought by her to the religious faith and the
freedom.-of the millions, in associating Christianity
with all the crimes, outrages and shames of absolute
monarchy in modern Europe. She must answer at
the bar of history for the fact that unbelief is so
extensively the badge of liberal and reform principles, in central and southern Europe. It is she that
has abused oppressed nations with the stupendous




168           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
and deadly falsehood, that in loving liberty they
must hate Jesus Christ, and that insurrection against
Christianity must be the first step in unchaining
Europe. She must answer for the general unbelief
and hate toward the Christian religion that pervades
the liberal party in Catholic Christendom; which
this hour render the conjunction of freedom with
faith and order impossible, and make the emancipation of Europe a despair for a long era. Never was
there a conjuniction more baleful in the horoscope of
Europe, than when the despotic Church and State
appeared in portentous alliance in its house of life,
brandishing their shackles and their wrath not only
over this world, but over the awful realms of the
everlasting, subsidizing in their war on humanity,
not only the terrors and pains of earthly racks and
dungeons, but the anger of God, the darkness of the
eternal prison, and the flames of an infinite despair.
This alliance presented religion itself as bolting the
dungeon doors of the nations, placing its own fiery
cherubim over the gateway to the better era, and
driving them from the tree of life. It was this disastrous conjunction that exhibited Christianity before
the millions as coming down from the past, laden
with all the sins and shames of absolute power in
Europe, for ten opprobrious centuries.
But could this be-could  spiritual despotism




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          169
through this alliance thus exhibit Christianity, without drawing on her the hate and execration of
nations, that went up against ages of cruel oppression?  Could she exhibit the Church of Jesus, thus
stained all over with the lust and bloodshed of European tyrannies, baptizing their frauds, consecrating
their cruelties, defending their abuses and absurdities, fawning upon their mistresses and minions, and'
canonizing with funeral falsehood monsters whose
names, rotting before their bodies, were already reeking in the nostrils of the whole world-could she
thus exhibit Christianity, the partner, the tool, the
sycophant of tyrants and banded with them in their
conspiracy against the liberties of mankind, without
shaking the faith of the world? Does not this false
presentation of Christianity by spiritual despotism
furnish ample solution of the strange feature of the
skepticism of the eighteenth century-strange for a
thing so cold and negative as unbelief-the rage, not
incredulity simply, but the rage, with which the
milliois rose against Christianity in the revolutionary
catastrophe of its close? Does it not also furnish an
explanation of the present melancholy condition of
the mind of Europe, and of that infidel and anarchical democracy which the convulsions of the old
world are perpetually pouring upon our shores?
This disastrous consequence of the spiritual despot



170           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
ism. of the old world in placing Christianity in a false
position before the million, is one of the gravest
perils of liberty as well as of Christian faith in this
age, and even in this country. It is one of the most
fearful difficulties of modern history.  Christianity
must be recognized by the nations as a deliverer
before they can be either permanently believing or
free.
I ask, then, in the close of our survey of this topic,
whether in analyzing and tracing the infidelity of the
eighteenth century, we have over-estimated the evil
efficacy of spiritual despotism-the usurpation of
authority by man over man in religious belief and
worship; the claim by one or an order, of mastery
over the religious faith of the million. Does it not
present itself, primarily and ultimately if not immediately, as the great cause-the cause of causes, of
that portentous phenomenon we have been tracing?
Was it not such of necessity through its war on the
right of private judgment, and consequently, on the
very power or possibility of faith? such through the
intellectual imbecility, the ignorance and corruption
it wrought in the Church a and such through its false
presentation of Christianity as a religion of force and
cruelty, the enemy of human freedom, a sanctuary
of fraud and lust, and the ally, accomplice and champion, of secular tyrannies? And shall we in full




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           171
view of such facts, go about this question with prudish and measured phrase, and timid and hesitant
suggestion, as though it involved some most difficult
mystery, requiring the most profound and delicate
analysis to resolve it?  Inquire after the skepticism
of the eighteenth century in the face of such a his~tory?  As- well ask why Hell is dark when the
shadow of the Devil is on it!
Much more, shall we permit pedantry and priestcraft and the minions of a spiritual despotism, in
stilted and sanctimonious cant, shaking the head in
oracular horror at progress and freedom, to perplex
with Jesuitical twaddle of " Protestant license and
cnarchy" a question so clear as this? a question
whose answer is so intuitive, that it lies back of all
argument; so instantaneous, that it outstrips all
process of induction, and flashes on the soul with the
quickness of instinct? a question, to decide which,
calls in no more a conscious philosophy, than does
touch or taste, or the eye or the ear? which can be
carried into the court of Logic not at all, but lies in
the realm of first principles and primary instincts,
that enter vitally and immortally into the constitution of the human soul?  Such enormities in the
name of God and Religion, casting no moral eclipse
on the world! It must be because there is no light
in its universe, no God in its sky! In the presence




172           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
of an ecclesiastical history like this, that throws a
shadow broad and black as Tartarus, to grope with
affected perplexity after the rationale of an age of
unbelief, and especially to point, in maudlin lament,
or solemn and pompous dogma, at Protestant yphilosophy and liberty as its guilty cause!-shall we allow
spiritual despotism thus to implead her antagonist
for her own crines? Make the light then creator of
darkness?  Day of the night! Accuse the morning
of the shadow of Mont Blanc! the sun of his own
eclipse! Until the laws of the human soul and the
moral world are subverted, such atrocities and
opprobrium with the arrogated sanction of God,
must darken the earth with infidelity. Such facts
and no skepticism?. That were even the most
hideous portent of all! A world in which such facts
should cast no shadow —that, sure, were Erebus!
We ask, then, in view of the argument and history
we have pursued, are we not justified in regarding
religious liberty as the safeguard rather than foe, of
religious faith? yea, as being the very life of
religion itself? Are we not right in contending,
never so jealously, against the intrusion among us
of servile and absolutistic principles in spiritual
interests? and the more so, the more insidious are
their approaches?
We know that wearied, disgusted and affrighted




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.          173
by the confusion, anarchy and revolution, that
manifest themselves in the religious world, there are
some among us who sigh for tranquillity as a supreme
good; and almost look around for refuge, order and
repose, even in the bosom of despotic authority.
But we cannot, if we would, find them there! We
ucannot if we would, thus lay aside the responsibility
of private judgment.  Heaven has appointed no
man, nor office, nor order, as infallible dispenser of
its truth; nor has it placed any marks on minds to
tell us who have the truth. Heaven gives us no
guarantees against shams. Yea, it tells us the truth
shall make us free. He that will serve, let him
know, he will serve tAe Devil. No power, not of
the kingdom of darkness, will accept at his hands
the impious surrender of his spiritual manhood.
History, moreover, arises with philosophy to warn
us, it is vain to seek permanent order even, under the
shadow of despotism. We have already seen from
that shadow, chaos and ruin rushing forth over a
cycleof European history. The impious children of
old night are there, the anarch brood of darkness and
wrath. No! Not that way at all! Not that way,
but in the clear, full, and fearless assertion of Protestant freedom, in full Protestant light and liberty,
lies the only way of safety for Church and society.
Nor could we carry the world that other way of des



174           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY,
potism, again, if we would; any more than we can
carry back the earth in its orbit. That way is, thank
God, closed up, we believe, for ever. The perils and
hopes of freedom are before us. Through freedom
we are to be saved, or through freedom to be lost,
for both worlds. Nor will we shrink back from the
responsibility, vast and solemn though it be: from
the perils inseparable from the hopes of liberty.
These perils-the perils of movement and changeare in the great necessities of progress. They are in
God's great order of life. We accept them thankfully, and on the whole, fearlessly. To us, life (the
life of liberty) is the most beautiful and beneficent
of things, or at least, nothing seems beautiful without
it. From  a world without it, we flee; our pulse
beats low and our breath grows difficult in its presence. Its uniformity oppresses, its very order is a
torture. We pray not, then, that the air be prisoned, though of its freedom be born the tempest! We
would not bar up the river, though its free stream
inundates the harvest, or bears the unwary to the
cataract! We would not chain up the ocean, though
I know ruin oft rides on its free and stormy wave!
I would not the wheel of the great globe were
stopped, though I know its free orbit bears through
frost and fire. No! free flow the river! free walk
ye winds the boundless air I! roll on in thy glorious




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM.           175
freedom, 0  sea! free be thy wheel, 0  earth,
through thy starry zone! for in your freedom, there
is life and beauty, music and joy! Take away free
movement and all things sicken, grow feeble, sad
and foul. The skies afflict us with their eternal
changelessness. iThe stars glare out from the stagnant infinite, like the staring eyes of the dead. An
agony of suffocation is on the air. Nature's great
heart-beat is stifled, and her vital currents curdle;
universal life gasps and faints under the vast
asphyxia. Yea, take away its free motion, and the
eternal vault collapses! this universal organism
goes into dissolution. So with regard to the world
of religious faith and order; chain up its movements
and you slay them. Repress the changes of life, and
those of death will enter. The attempt to conserve
them by the stereotype of despotism, is like attempting to keep the beauty of the body immortal by sealing it with the fixedness of death.  Under that
marbleized beauty, invades the worm. Decay, corruption, dissolution —these are the sure foredoomed
changes of that which under these heavens assumes
to be the changeless. Order in the social and
religious world is a thing not of mechanism, but of
life. It endures, not by stereotype, but by growth
and progress.  The march of Humanity and Christianity henceforth, is not to be taken between the




-176          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
alternatives of despotism with order on the one hand,
and liberty with danger of anarcAy on the other;
but between two banners, the one unfolding to the
free winds its motto, "  iberty wiith Hope, Iofe,with
Change, Progress with Peril;" while in letters of
night, stretches across that other way of humanity
the blazon, "Absolutism with Anarchy, Tyranny
with Torpor, Despotism with su8re Decay,.Despair,
Death."




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM  IN FRANCE.             177
CHAPTER VII.
FRANCE.
France the most Powerful Generator and Diffuser of Infidelity —
Her Position in Modern History-The Model Kingdom of Europe
-Oracle of Civilization-Her Early Culture-Genius-Language
-Court Literature-Political Ascendency-Self-diffusivenessCauses of Infidelity in her Civil and Ecclesiastic Constitution and
History-Religious Wars-Albigenses-Huguenots-Separation of
the Actual from the Ideal the widest-Reaction of Repressed
Mind most Passionate-Daring and Revolutionary Despotism in
France in the 17th and 18th Centuries-Absolutism of Louis XIV.
-Its Mischief-Two Great Crimes of the French Church and
Monarchy Generative of Infidelity - Ecclesiastic Barbarism
extending down toward the close of the 18th Century-Torture
and Execution at Abbeville 1776-l)Despotism in France applied
to a iind the most Active, Daring, Witty and Philosophic in
Europe.
IN our view of the great defection of the human
mind  from   Christianity  in  the  seventeenth  and
eighteenth centuries, we have thus far been engaged
for the most part, with causes and principles of
general and well-nigh of universal scope,. throughout
Christendom  during this era.  We now  propose, in
further illustration and analysis of our theme, to look
more narrowly at the geographic centre and focus
8*




178           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
of 5the plague. That view will develop important
principles in relation to the laws of its origin and
propagation.
In illustration and enforcement of general principles thus far considered, it has been seen that our
constant fountain of instances is French history and
society.  We now  propose  to direct attention
especially to that fountain, France itself; and consider her especial efficiency in producing the sad
phenomenon we are investigating.
Eminent amid the causes of the spread of skepticism over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, stands forth the prominent and commanding position of France in European civilization
during that period.
France was in those ages the most powerful
elaborator and diffuser of infidelity, as she was the
most powerful elaborator and diffuser of all elements
of civilization. The French mind was the most
active in Europe-the most generative, the most diffusive. Thoughts, feelings, ideas, sentiments, manners went forth from Paris to the possession of
Europe.
The causes of this position of France in modern
civilization radicate back to the birth of modern
Europe. The municipal remains of ancient civilization, proximity to the scenes where ancient literature




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.      179
and art lingered longest and were earliest revived,
the rise of the Frank Empire earliest amid political
or at least national and imperial forms after the fall
of the Roman Empire, were among the originating
influences.  Subsequently, Provengal culture, the
earlier consolidation of the French M-Ionarchy and
formation of the French Court, with the most brilliant
and perfect development of chivalry and;ieudalism,
the magnificence of baronies and baronial courts
and their subsequent focalization in that of royalty,
the agitation and collision of the parties in the era of
the Reformation and their final equipoise in the
pacification of Nantes —these  causes conspiring
perhaps with the livelier genius of the French mind,
had contributed to give to that mind a culture more
mature, refined, productive and energetic than any
other in Western or Central Europe. And not only
was the French mind the most prolific of ideas, but
from influences hereafter to be specified, it was the
most likely of all to reflect the skeptical genius of
the age.
The above causes of earlier culture and of finer
and livelier energy in the French mind, tended with
other influences to make France also the mnost powerful diffuser of her civilization, whatever it might be.
To this result conspired moreover the distinctive
personal genius of brilliant and powerful monarchs.




180          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Thus, in consequence of all these causes, in France
earliest amid the nations of modern Europe, the regal
court having absorbed the baronial, coercing or
alluring the noblesse from their fastnesses to the
Capital, Paris had become France, and France
under the Valois and Bourbons, had become the
metropolis of civilization itself; the model kingdom
of Europe; the most consolidated, powerful, brilliant
and courtly amid its monarchies, and with a type of
culture the most polished and cosmopolite. She was
leader in the literary, social and political realm; the
standard of taste, manners, literature and philosophy
as well as of civil and military administration and of
diplomacy. Her genius was mistress in saloons and
academies, in the cabinet and on the field of battle.
What was French was sure to become European. A
peculiar vivacity and polish had given a peculiar
diffusiveness to her intellectual and social culture.
Her Court became the mirror of gallantry and gaiety,
of wit and grace, and of brilliant and elegant dissoluteness. Under the corrupting though splendid
rule of Francis I. and Henry IV. the vigorous and
sagacious administration of Richelieu, and especially
by the magnificence of arts and arms under the
ambitious Louis XIV., she had been conducted forward almost to the attainment of universal empire,
not only in politics but in civilization.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    181
A galaxy of great men, brilliant generals, statesmen, courtiers and ecclesiastics, of poets, orators
and philosophers, illustrates the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in France; but they gather
especially in a sidereal coronal around the throne of
the grand MIonarque. It will suffice to name a
Cond6, Turenne, Colbert, Louvois, Villars, Luxembourg, among statesmen and generals the first of the
age; and allude to the genius of a Corneille, Molikre
and Racine, in the drama; a La Fontaine, Des
Cartes, Boileau, Malebranche and Boyle in philosophy; or a Bourdaloue, F6n6lon, Bossuet and
Massillon, in sacred eloquence; all of these, and hosts
of others of world-wide fame, constellating round the
reign of Louis XIV. During the eighteenth century,
Paris became the intellectual, social and political
captial of Christendom; Versailles, the supreme
court of European culture. The French language,
with its facile, insinuating, conversable genius became
every where the common medium of intercourse for
the courtly and the learned; the French monarch,
the most perfect and brilliant example of absolute
power, the study and model of all despots. In
short to an extent never equalled by any other
nation in modern times, France became the oracle of
civilization.
We have to add also to the above causes of the




182           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
peculiar diffusiveness of French civilization in the
eighteenth century, the centrality of her geographic
position, placing her among and between the most
powerful European States; and also the peculiar
complaisance and sympathy, the versatility, sociability and geniality, of the French mind; which seem
to have distinctively marked it all through modern
history, and have made it the most self diffusing
in Europe; insomuch that Guizot states truly "It is
necessary wherever an idea is born, it should pass
through the medium of the French mind in order to
take possession of Europe."
All the above causes combined to make France in
the eighteenth century-what Guizot terms her,
"the centre and focus of modern civilization;" and
predetermined the universal spread of any social
distemperature arising within her; evidently, taking
possession of the French mind, it must make the
tour of the continent.
But while France thus was a most effective selfdiffuser, it was the calamity of modern history, that
she was, at the same time, of all the nations of
Europe, the most powerful elaborator and generator
of religious skepticism. She was so through her
history and society; through her Church, her court,
and her literature.
Let us look at the relations of some of these ele



SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.      183
ments of her civilization to the unbelief of the age.
We shall find, that while she is the model and oracle
of European civilization, she at the same time exhibits in -herself most of the various causes we have
already discussed, of the infidelity of the eighteenth
century, existing in their most effective and virulent
Ptype.
Her history must have been a prolific fountain of
infidelity. Her page of religious wars and persecutions, from the crusade against the Albigenses to the
expulsion of the Huguenots, was amid the foulest and
bloodiest in Europe; bleared over with perjury and
cruelty, assassination and massacre. She had during
the period of the Reformation been convulsed and
torn for generations by religious wars. From the
sins, shames and treacheries, the hypocrisies, fanaticisms and atrocities, of those wars, abusing the name
of God and Christianity, and breeding a disgust and
horror at religion from the frightful dissoluteness of
manners springing from them and from the moral
collapse or relaxation following them-from all these
causes sown in her history, must have sprung a
woeful harvest of incredulity and hate toward religion.
Two great specific crimes in her history, most
ruinous to French faith, we shall have occasion to
notice presently. We now refer, in general, to her




184           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
religious history, as peculiarly productive of infidelity.
In France, again, the reaction of the human mind
against the ages of intellectual enslavement which
Europe had suffered, had been most passionate,
excessive and anarchical, in her the revolution in
philosophy had wrought most mightily and successfully in science; but in the realm of religion, had
run a course most wild, daring, impious and ruinous.
Here under the pressure of a triple despotism over
politics, religion and science, the severance of speculation from affairs had been widest; the ideal and
the actual most violently forced asunder; and here
in consequence the shock of their rebound and collision was destined to be the most terrible to the order
and faith of society.
In France, moreover, Mammonism had exhibited
its climacteric of fever and delirium. In her was
the most complete dethronement of the religious idea
and most absolute supremacy of that of wealth. In
her the money mania had wrought its wildest and
maddest excesses; had most demoralized society, and
brought it nearest to dissolution.
These effects manifested themselves-not because
France was worst or lowest in the scale of European
nations; certainly, not because of intellectual and
moral imbecility. In these respects other states fell




SPIRI UAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    185
far below her. The above causes of irreligion operated in France with peculiar malignancy, because
in her case there was a peculiar intellectual and
moral activity of the nation, cofmbined with inertness,
corruption and imbecility of the religious power.
There was life the most intense, passionate and energetic, beating in the heart of France; but life
without religious illumination or control; a life on
which pressed a tremendous despotism of force, and
toward which the Church exhibited simply repressive acts of power, not the influences of principle,
reason and truth. When those acts of power became.
impotent to enforce submission, as they ultimately
did, the very impotency of their attempted tyranny
irritated and provoked the excesses they could not
restrain. With some other Catholic States there was
no abnormal action, because there was not action at
all; there was no fever, no spasm, no delirium,
because the national mind had been stifled to long
syncope, if not to death. The same blow of power
whichhad stunned them, had however only made
France blind and frantic. Tyranny which does not
kill, maddens. The more crushing it be this side
death, the more it maddens.  In France it had
reached that limit and only that. In Spain it seems
to have passed it. By all these facts, France was a
prolific generator of infidelity. Amid them all, the




186           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
great cause of causes, the one back of all, as previously shown, was DESPOTISM — -the joint tyranny of
Church and monarchy, extending over almost all life
and every interest.
Let us now look at the position of that cause in
France, at the close of the seventeenth century. We
shall see if our former reasonings were correct, France
must have been a fearful elaborator of unbelief,
through her politico-ecclesiastical despotisqm.
Her absolutism was the most absolute in Europemost absolute in Church and State. Her imperious
Louis XIV. had become, to use his own language,'" the State," and he might have added, the Church,
too. For between him and his will, he brooked not
baron, or prelate, or pope. In this arbitrariness of
will, he was the Henry VIII. of French History.
At least, if not ordaining himself expressly, as the
supreme oracle of religious faith, to his subjects, he
showed himself the most absolute enforcer of the
spiritual despotism, which he chose to constitute or
admit; whether of the pope or of the Gallic church.
Church and State were bound in adamant to his
throne; though it was adamant draped and lacquered
over with purple and gold. The most iron absolutism was maintained, over the realm of politics and
religion. In these realms an omnipresent censorship,
and espionage, watched and punished all free




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    187
thought; at least, all that seemed to have any practical bearings on the outward form of Church and
State. Parliament and estates, baronial prerogatives
and provincial, and municipal privileges, all breakwaters of despotism, were broken down before the
march of absolute power. The Huguenots that had
withstood it, had been ruthlessly driven out, bearing
to other lands their resentment and despair, and their
millions of men and money. The Jansenist, seemingly worn out with persecutions, had been smothered
in prisons, or were repenting in exile. The blood of
Saint Bartholomew, if it was the seed of the Church
of its martyrs, was a slow seed. For a long time
that bloody stroke of despotism seemed to have
accomplished its cruel end; to have slain, well-nigh,
whatever elements there were of civil and religious
liberty and reform, in the French nation. Seen as
we now see it, it was a murderous stroke at the very
life'of France, that was to be awfully avenged.
Protestantism  was in time to come forth from its
bloody-grave, the Nemesis of Revolution. Smothered
Jansenism was to break out anew in the plagues of
skepticism and irreligion; and from Saint Bartholomew's fatal day, were to go forth the avenging furies,
that should at last drag Church and monarchy, and
the nation itself, under the guillotine.
But for the time, it seemed as if these stupendous




188          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
crimes had been successful, and the triumph of despotism, spiritual and political, seemed hideously
complete. Not a tongue dared wag against it, in all
the realms of France. There it stood, spiritual despotism wedded to political, armed with the strength
and genius, the vast military force, and the iron
absolutism  of the mightiest, most brilliant, most
imperial monarchy in Europe; the banners of olden
glories floating over its battlements; the muses of
grace, beauty, and pleasure, waiting in its palaces;
genii of wit and song, and eloquence and victory,
chained to its throne; and the swords of the heroic
and the mighty, keeping watch and ward around it.
The cry and the curse of the millions far below,
could not rise to its heaving. The voice of the confessors of spiritual and political liberty, had sunk
with their blood down to the silent depths of the
earth, no more to rise. It seemed the absolute
triumph of absolute despotism; despotism  over
State and Church; over all acting, all speaking, all
thinking; political, ecclesiastical or theological.
And what provinces did not these terms then
embrace?
But was it absolute, was it final? Nay. Its very
brilliancy was its hectic of decay. So much genius
could not live with so much despotism. Its very
completeness was a sure sign of its fall; unless




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.     189
indeed, humanity was utterly stifled below it.. For
down in the dark and foul depths below that splendor, the million crushed, scourged, gagged, blinded,
still breathed. The fever of life and all life's fiercest
lusts, still rioted in its veins; nor had its mangled
eyes altogether forgotten the light they had once
beheld.
Now need we repeat our argument of a former
chapter, to prove that France with such a political
and ecclesiastical absolutism, must have been a prolific generator of infidelity? A despotism, that by
its repression of mind in the paths of the practical,
drove it into wild, unrestrained, licentious speculation
in the realms of the ideal; that by its war on private judgment struck at reason itself, and all power
of belief; made timid and feeble, when it could not
destroy the faith of nations; and rendered the
Church intellectually imbecile, by forbidding the
exercise of the free intellect, by taking away the
necessity of argumentative conflict or defence, by
bestowment of the power of force, and by removing
the premiums on erudition, discovery or scientific
and logical culture;. a despotism that corrupted the
church with gold and security, with indolence, ambition, servility and arrogance, by placing authority in
connexion with tyrannic power, and cutting it off
from the moral sense of mankind; corrupted it, by




190           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
incorporating the world with the Church; thus confounding religious ideas, and obliterating religious
distinctions among mankind; that corrupted it by
applying to it the pestilent curse of celibate and
confessional, and by draggling its robes through the
cabal and conspiracy, the intrigue, sycophancy and
debauch, of dissolute courts, and jostling it with
their parasites, placemen, ruffians, mistresses, and
minions! a despotism, that stripped Christianity of
its moral prestige as a religion of superior truth,
reason and love; changed it to one of force, malignancy, and tyranny; and made it the enemy of
human liberty, and the accomplice and champion of
all the crimes and scandal, cruelties and oppressions
of the civil tyrannies of modern Europe; and finally
a despotism that invested the Church with the armor
of infallibility, as a mail of burning steel, sheathing
up all its future with the lies and crimes of all its
past, stereotyping each error, each folly, each sin,
each shame, of its history, however dim, distant,
guilty or gloomy, for ever past all repentance or
amendment, to the astonishment, abhorrence and execration of all time! Could a despotism, working all
this in France for ages, fail of darkening, if not
utterly destroying the faith of the nation? Was not
France, therefore, by the necessity of its political
and ecclesiastical despotism, developed in our pre



SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    191
vious argument, sure to become a fearful laboratory
of infidelity?2 IHaving traversed the ground botjh in
fact and logic, in a previous chapter, we need not
stop here to go over it again.
But the curses of her despotism did not stop here.
It led her into acts and measures for the repression
or extinction of dissent, which made her Church a
hissing and abhorrence for a century, to all the
enlightened and thinking of Europe. Especially two
stupendous crimes it led her to perpetrate, that
proved two deadly wounds in her own bosom, gushing with gore and the poison of unbelief, over centuries and kingdoms. Those two great crimes by
which she thought to purchase security and immobility, are now clearly seen to have embarked her on
a wild, dark, and bloody sea, over which she was to
drift for ages with no God in her sky.
The two great crimes of the French church and
monarchy in enforcement of spiritual despotism, the
massacre of:St. Bartholomew, and the exile of the
Huguenots, it is now clearly seen, avenged themselves in the destruction of both. They were suicidal to French faith, French royalty, and French
liberty, at the same time; blood-blotches on her
history, destined, as we now see, to spread over the
pages of at least two centuries. Terrible mistakes
were they, as well as crimes. They exterminated




192          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
from the realm of France, those who alone might
have reformed both Church and State, before the
irrepressible wrath of the nation broke forth in the
fire blast of the revolution.
In one of these acts, from forty thousand to fifty
thousand, according to the most reliable historians,
of the noblest and most enlightened of the nation,
were butchered in France and the provinces in one
day, in the midst of profound security, through the
diabolic treachery of the court, instigated beforehand by Jesuit and priest, and congratulated and
celebrated afterwards by the pope ordering Te Deums
to be sung for it, in the churches in the capital of
Catholic Christendom.
By the other, the revocation of the edict of Nantz
in the single province of Languedoc, one hundred
thousand were put to death under military execution; of whom a tenth part, at least, suffered from
the frightful torments of the stake and wheel. Four
hundred thousand at least fled the kinglom, and an
equal number perished of famine, plague, imprisonment, the galleys and the scaffold. The faith of one
hundred thousand more at least, was crushed down
in tears and agony and blood, into recantation, and
the silent smouldering hate of ages.
The Duc St. Simon, a Catholic, and one of the
courtiers of Louis XIV. and an eve-witness of the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    193
atrocious execution of the royal edict, thus narrates;
" by this edict," says he, " without the slightest pretext, without the slightest necessity, was one fourth
of the kingdom depopulated, its trade ruined, the
whole country abandoned to the avowed public
pillage of dragoons; the innocent of both. sexes were
devoted to punishment and torture, and that by
thousands. *  *  *  * The world saw crowds of
their fellow creatures proscribed, naked, fugitive,
guilty of no crime, yet seeking in foreign lands an
asylum from the cruelty of their own;.which meantime was subjecting to the lash and the galleys the
noble, the opulent, the aged, the weak, the delicate
and those not less distinguished by their rank than
their piety and virtue; and this for no reason but
their religion. Still further 4o increase the horror of
these proceedings, every province was filled with
perjured and sacrilegious men; who were forced to
recant. In truth such were the horrors produced by
the combined operation of cruelty and obsequiousness, fhat within twenty-four hours, men were frequently conducted from the torture to abjuration,
and from abjuration to the communion table;
attended in both generally by the common executioner."  Thus far St. Simon.
Now we ask does not this record point to one fearful fountain at least of the evil we are tracing? Do




194          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
not the infidelity and revolution of the eighteenth
century gush out of these two great repressive measures of the French church and monarchy? In the
first place, could any nation in Europe have borne
at that day such a bleeding of its purest, noblest,
most gifted blood, its martyr, heroic, sainted blood,
without moral exhaustion and paralysis, and without
dooming its future to a reactive paroxysm of fever
and delirium?  Could the provinces, as St. Simon
describes, "be filled with perjured men, one hundred
thousand or more, that had passed from the gibbet
and wheel to the communion attended by the public
executioner," without the spreading as Alison asserts,
of " the poison of infidelity and irreligion throughout
the realm of France.?"
Again, could the unspeakable atrocities of the
dragonnades of Louis XIV., according to the statement of a Catholic courtier of that monarch, depopulating one fourth of France, pillaging provinces,
devoting the innocent of both sexes-the aged, the
delicate and the noble -to the scourge and the torture by thousands, driving into exile or crushing into
recantation fifteen hundred thousand persons —could
this take place in the light of the close of the seventeenth century, without drawing down upon the
Church, in whose name they were perpetrated, and
on religion itself, as far as the Church was regarded




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.     195
as its representative, the indignant and scornful
incredulity of mankind?  Could history remember
the noble Coligni, his white hair dragged in blood,
his heroic form mangled with murder, and trodden
the livelong day of ruffian feet in the streets of Paris
-or the infuriate Charles of Valois screaming through
-the awful tumult of the carnage from the windows
of the Louvre, " till, kill!"-or the complot of the
Tiger-Cat of Florence with Jesuit fraud weaving
meshes for the trusting victims;-could  history
remember all these-much more the Te IDeums from
the religious capital of the Catholic world! and by
order of its supreme pontiff! that went up as thanksgiving to Jehovah at the tidings, as if an orison of
murder to the Aztec war-god! could history ever
remember these without something of that shudder
of horror, that thrilled through nations at the time, at
the dreadful rumor of those atrocities, and without
breathing a chill of skepticism over all the realms of
Catholic faith where Romanism was synonomous with
Christianity?
We direct attention to this record in French history with no pleasure, nor with a wish to bring odium
on any communion repenting of its past sins; but
truth to our theme points to these as part of the
terrible causes of the terrible phenomenon we are
analyzing.  "Hence was it," says Alison, "that




196          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
philosophy confounding religion with atrocities perpetrated in its name, became imbued with skepticism,
and the cause of human emancipation became synonymous in general opinion with the overthrow of
Christianity."
But indeed the French church would not let history forget if she would, her complicity in the atrocities of the past. That Church brought down into the
light of the latter half of the eighteenth century the
torture and cruel punishments of barbarous ages,
and that for the merest indiscretions. For an insult
offered in a drunken frolic to a wooden crucifix, on
a bridge in Abbeville, in 1776, a youth of sixteen or
seventeen years of age, son of an ancient family in
the magistracy, was first put to the torture, then had
his tongue cut out, and was finally beheaded. And
this scene in the age of Chatham and Burke-under
the same sun that looked down on a Pitt, Franklin
and Washington, in open sight before the wits and
theophilanthropists of the Encyclopedia!  Can we
wonder or regret that the indignant sarcasm of Voltaire transfixed the Church guilty of such abominable cruelty and impaled it for the derision and hate of
all Europe? or that the million with its great human
heart felt there was quite as much religion in the
humanity of the skeptic as in the pitiless fanaticism
of the ecclesiastic?




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.     197
For French irreligion then-the fountain of unbelief to Europe-we must arraign the French church
in both its-theory and practice. [But that disastrous
theory and practice flow directly from the spiritual
despotism incorporated in it. Its tyrannous principles and its revolting history emanate directly from
that dark fountain.  Spiritual despotism, through
the French church, must be arraigned then at the
bar of history for the great apostasy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Thus we shall find the double despotism of France
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries preparing
an era of unbelief in that kingdom. Especially by
the repressive'measures to which the alliance of
spiritual and political absolutism tempted the Church,
we have found unbelief and hatred of the Church,
and of Christianity, which it represented, of necessity
generated in the French nation.
Thus was France a terrible elaborator and evangelist of infidelity; not only by the essential genius
of alLdespotism over faith, and especially of a despotism like hers; but she was especially so, by the
peculiar measures she took to enforce that despotism;
measures which the human mind in its native inextinguishable moral sense, could not but feel were as
alien from a God of truth and mercy, and purity, as
Hell from Heaven.  The eternal instincts of the




198          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
human soul must be extinguished before a religion
consecrating such horrors could be forced down the
throat of humanity, even though throttled and wellnigh stifled in its own gore! Voltaire's Dictionary
of Philosophy, Ilelvetius's System of Nature, Paine's
Age of Reason, the Encyclopedia-they were terrible Gospels of unbelief, but what were they all to
the history of France herself! It was in itself an
encyclopedia of irreligion and infidelity. More fatal
to faith than the sneers and sophisms that hissed and
glittered over Europe from Lake Leman, more
terrible than the eloquence of the Gironde or the
rage of the Mountain, was that volume written, like
the scroll seen of Ezekiel, "all over within and
without with mourning, lamentation and woe."
But in order to estimate the power of France as a
generator of unbelief, we have to add to the above
necessary tendencies of despotism, the condition of
the French mind at this time, to which this despotism
was applied. It was arresting a Niagara in its rapids.
We have said above, the triumph of despotism
seemed to be complete. It was far from being so
It could not become so without, we will not say slaying the mind of France, but without a massacre of
half of its population. It had not begun its work
soon enough, or prosecuted it ruthlessly enough,
bloody as it had been. It required the Inquisition




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.     199
and Philip II. and Spanish fanaticism to accomplish
the work. Nor could these even have effected it
for perpetuity. Now we are to bear in mind, this
absolute repression of French thought and speech in
the direction of State and Church, i. e. in the direction
of the great practical and visible interests of society,
was attempted on a mass of mind, if not the freest,
thie most licentious and volatile and vivacious, the
most active, daring and irrepressible, in Europemind, which had felt most profoundly the stroke of
the Reformation, and had sympathized deeply with
that insurrection against the despotism of the spiritual power; which in art, science, brilliant culture
and general literature, stood foremost amid western
nations; and which had entered with peculiar enthusiasm and success on the paths of free speculation
and discovery, opened by the emancipation of the
European intellect from the Aristotelian and Scholastic system, and by the application of the Baconian
and Cartesian methods to science. No nation had
felt the impulse, religious and philosophic, of the age,
more profoundly.  Massacre and exile had not
quenched that impulse, but only removed those who
would have enlightened, tempered and guided it. It
left it wild, blind, guideless, and faithless. Despotism could not annihilate the force that had been
generated. Its suppression could only stop the relief




200          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
movement of progress, shut down the safety-valve
and bind the terrible power within, with rivet and
clamp and bar! could it fail to make explosion in
time, inevitable and terrible? Despotism over such
a mass of mind it is evident could hardly be  permanently successful, short of absolute extermination.
Short of that, it would certainly madden it. You
could not stop the mind's thinking, you might make
thought perverse; if you put out its true lights, it
would be certain to chase false ones. Arrest the
natural outblow salutary to life, it will be sure to
break out in ulcers or rush back in fever on the
heart or in delirium on the brain. Such was the
achievement of spiritual despotism in France; she
struck at Heresy; she slew Faith! She shut against
the nations the temples of Truth. They prostrated
themselves in delirium before lies! She covered
from them the face of Jehovah. They rushed to the
shrines of Moloch and Mammon and of No-God'!
She plunged the nation into the skepticism of ignorance-or of denying Christianity from not knowing
what it is. They rushed in frantic rage against that
Church that abused the name of Christ and Christianity from knowing too well what it was. The sad
truth is, France was without a knowledge of true
Christianity. A despotic, cruel, superstitious Church
had barred out spiritual illumination, had wrested




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.      201
from the millions the Bible, forbidden the free exercise of reason on matters of faith, bloodily repressed
all questioning of its own authority, legislation, or
institutes, and forced itself on the formal acceptance
of mankind as being truly representative of Christ
and His Gospel. Itself, with all its hollow pretence
and hypocrisy, its corruptions and debauchery, its
frauds and puerilities, stood before the philosophic,
scientific and witty mind of France as the embodiment of the Christian religion. The Church standing thus —a defeature on the age, an offence to its
intelligence and conscience, a foe to liberty and progress, was of course abandoned of the French mind.
It turned from it in loathing and contempt. Alas it
derided and cursed Christianity itself. And we can
hardly wonder, if this was all the Christianity it
knew. And such it was to the millions of France.
Indeed even Voltaire was profoundly ignorant of the
Scriptures and the Faith against which he directed
the sneer of all Europe. So were many of his followers.
1Morell gives very truly the process of French infidelity, and fitly defines it when he calls it the "': Infidelity of ignorance."
But though ignorant of Christianity and the Bible,
the French literati were learned in science, and acute
and comprehensive in philosophic analysis; and they
9*




202           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
could feel and show the discrepancies of science with
the teachings of the Church. So here again spiritual, despotism begat unbelief; not only by errors
and falsities into which all may fall, but by the fact
that she could never retract or repent. Every absurdity was eternized by her infallibility. Thus she
was compelled to array science against Christianity.
In Protestant countries spiritual despotism escaped
this consequence, because of its logical inconsistency.
It abjured all claim to the infallibility that should
accompany a vicegerency of Heaven; while at the
same time, it arrogated the power and authority
attaching only to such infallibility. Strictly speaking, it was more tyrannous, but at the same time less
mischievous, in the Protestant than the Romish
communion, because of its illogicalness. The former
may repent —the latter, a terrible consistency petrifies to the derision and execration of all the future.,This her impeccableness, binding her to not only
the defence of, but to persistency in all the past, in
the presence of the French mind of the eighteenth
century, must have been a fearful generator of unbelief and irreligion.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM  IN FRANCE.         203
CHAPTER VIII.
FRANCE.
French Literature of the 18th century-Infidel Writers and Savans
-Mission of Infidelity organized-Its Apostles and Evangelists,
Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists-Their Quarry, the
French church-Its Corruption, Ignorance, Superstitions and
Cruelties-Jesuitism-Its Expose and Fall-Money-madness in
France-The Primal Fountain of her Infidelity-Politico-Ecclesiastical Despotism.
IT was again the application of spiritual despotism
to the French mind, such as we have above described
that produced the portentous birth of the FRENcH
LITERATURE of the eighteenth century; a birth as
strangely mighty and wicked as those from the misalliance of the sons of God with the daughters of
men, in the early world; giants in power and
in impiety.
We-'ote then France as especially an elaborator
of infidelity through her literature, which literature
was her protest against spiritual despotism.
Most terrible amid its legion of mischief, was that
infernal birth which despotism had begotten on the
French mind; at first, in driving that mind, as we




204           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
have before noticed, from all questions of Church or
State, and existing institutions, under the wand of
this despotism. The policy of iron absolute repression in these directions, was attempted on a national
mind the most stimulated, active, and in many walks,
the furthest advanced in Europe. It could not fail
to produce strange and portentous results. Obstructed in its old paths, it was impelled the more fiercely
into tortuous and erratic ones. Divorced from the
healthful restraints of the present and the actual, it
plunged with boundless extravagance into the realms
of the speculative and ideal. It avenged its tyrannous exclusion from certain fields, by frantic license in
those left open. It might not touch directly faiths
and institutions. It mined under all. Priest and
king were prescribed to it. It rushed the more
madly on the primal truths of philosophy, morality,
religion and government; and wreaked its resentment for the cruelties, absurdities, the bloody and
drivelling superstitions, enforced by the double
tyranny above, by, first a covert doubt, and, finally,
a frantic rage against Christianity and God himself.
The Church had sown the wind, and she was to reap
the whirlwind. The wrongs of ecclesiastic power
arrogating to be Christianity in the previous centuries, its puerilities and mummeries, its outrages on
common reason and conscience, were to bear their




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.     205
bitterest fruit in the eighteenth century; first in the
literature of France, then the commanding one of
the world; at last, the sown dragon's teeth were to
spring up as armed men. The mind of France mistaking Romanism for Christianity, rose against
religion in strange ferocity.  The most brilliant
genius of France was combined and organized in
this dreadful warfare. The Abb6 Raynal contributed
the charms of historic eloquence and painting, caricaturing priests and Christianity, and embellishing
a seductive naturalism; D'Alembert threw into the
cause the genius whose wondrous, clear-eyed, comprehensive vision, had traced the mysteries of the
modern analysis; the prodigious and varied erudition, and graceful taste of lIelvetius, Diderot, and
their compeers, argued, embellished and insinuated
the most frightful irreligion, and most revolting
sensualism. The novels of Crebillon, and Le Clos,
Louvet's memoirs and innumerable madrigals, with
appliances, to the public mind, of licentious adventures, voluptuous paintings, erotic sonnets, and undisguised obscenities, labored in the same evil gospel of
materialism. " Such was the influence of writers of
this school," says Alison, "that almost the whole
philosophical and literary writings of France for a
quarter of a century before the Revolution, were
infidel. When David Hume was invited to meet a




206           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
party of eighteen of the most literary men in the
French capital, he found to his astonishment that he
was the least skeptical of the party. He was the
only one present who admitted even the probable
evidence of the Supreme Being." If such was the
religious eclipse in the realm of literature, we shall
hardly wonder that the darkness spread over all the
land.
Thus the curse of despotism, combining such terrible repression with so much life, necessitated this
erratic, infidel, and finally anarchical career of mind.
That literature that, amid the peacock pageant and
hollow prudery of the model despotism of Europethat of Louis XIV.-displays itself on that "extraordinary Parnassus where," according to Menzel,
" Apollo in the pedantic bagwig, led with his fiddle
the concert of frizzed and powdered muses, disguised
in bodices with hoop-petticoats," and where " of the
ancient motto of French chivalry —God, the king,
honor and the ladies-only God and honor were left
out "-that literature we do not wonder at seeing
throw off those hollow proprieties and hypocritic
pruderies as'soon as the model despot was cold in
his grave, and ministering in utter shamelessness in
the Circean revel of the Regent. Nor are we surprised at finding that having passed from prudery to
revel, it now passed from revel to rage; and in the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    207
IMoloch orgies of revolution, appeared a genius of
ruin; scattering phrenzy and flame through cathedral and palace, where ages before it exhibited its
servile and hollow mummeries. The change from
the prude and hypocrite to the wanton and blasphemer, was a necessity of literature under such a
despotism applied to such a national mind.: Nor can we wonder that infidelity breakring forth
as a pestilence from France as its central focus overspread Europe; especially, when we remember how
in her, infidelity became organized as a mission, and
who were the great apostles, and who the evangelists
of that mission!
Probably the earth never saw a more powerful or
brilliant combination of intellects, nor one united in
a more portentous project, than those who in the
eighteenth century conspired for the overthrow of
Christianity. They labored in their terrible work
with the splendor and passion, the genius and hate
of a cohort of fallen angels. Paris was the origin
and centre of this conspiracy; France its first
theatre. But from Paris its meshes spread through
Europe.
The chief of this conspiracy, VOLTAIRE, was one of
those wondrously gifted men that seem sent of
Heaven, now in mercy, and now for punishment,
among mankind. His genius quick, acute, vigorous,




208           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
subtle and infinitely versatile, was armed with a
sense of the ridiculous that, eager as the lightning,
flashed on its quarry in all things; his wit nimble
and glittering as that flash, and as terrible. By the
terror of his sneer he was a potentate in Europe.
His epigrams pursued the prince to the recesses of
his palace, and smote the general at the head of his
armies, and beauty in her pride of triumph.  His
sarcasm hissed above the revel of saloons or the
clangor of arms.  "His mockery was perhaps the
most terrible intellectual weapon ever wielded by
man.  Bigots and tyrants," says IMacaulay, "who
had never been moved by the wailing and cursing
of millions, turned pale at his name. Principles
unassailable by reason-principles that had withstood the fiercest attacks of power, the most valuable
truths, the most generous sentiments, the noblest and
most graceful images, the purest reputations, the
most august institutions, began to look mean and
loathsome, soon as that withering smile was turned
upon them."
He appeared as it were the Mephistophiles of fiction, moving amid the shams, corruptions; fooleries
and hypocrisies of France and Europe in the eighteenth century. In truth his genius was Satanic in
its hardness and meanness, as in its brilliancy; without true sympathy with goodness or greatness. That




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    209
terrible mind was the slave of puerile superstitions
and petty passions, envious, malignant and egotistical. Not simply an unbeliever, his hatred to Christianity was diabolic, inexplicable except on the
ground of a strange ignorance of Christianity, and
a view of the deformed caricature presented in its
name. His eye seems to have been blinded to all
but abuses of things. He seemed to war on all that
for good or evil had authority. He built no system,
left no doctrine.  "No human teacher ever left
behind him such a wreck of truths and falsehoods."
From  beautiful Lake Leman he fulmined over
Europe a mere genius of ruin; like Milton's archangel hurling the wrecks of the world against its
author.
Close beside him in bad eminence-co-worker of
ruin, history places Rousseau; similar in wondrous
intellectual endowment, and united in the same evil
aim; yet most unlike in genius. While Voltaire
sneered away the faith of Europe, he corrupted it
through the sensibilities. Its moral sense was relaxed under the fascination of his sentiment; its faith
and virtue were dissolved in a paroxysm of tears.
IHe tangled the mind of Europe with soft subtleties,
dazzled it with shining sophisms, and intoxicated it
with false but delicious dreams; could make Europe
weep in sympathy with his romance of exquisite and




210           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.'heroic pathos, and admire the eloquence of his wonderful eulogy on Jesus Christ, and then could expose
his illegitimate children at the doors of foundling
hospitals.
The Encyclopedists  who followed in their train,
carried out to their results, and distributed throughout all the domain of science, the principles and
sentiments of these master magicians. In the latter
part of the reign of Louis XV., they openly aspired
to effect a revolution in almost all subjects of human thought; to remold the world, its institutions,
opinions and habits. The problem was to reconstruct the world and leave God out of it. The Encyclopedia-first of the name —is the monument of
their combination-a work of vast service to philosophy, science, legislation and social progress; pleading for liberty against tyrannies and abuses of all
kinds, but bitter with hate against Christianity belied
in their presence by its professed representative.
To this warfare on Christianity were marshalled the
most brilliant writers of France or of Europe of that
period. And what a quarry was revealed before
them in a Church fatally conserving the fatuities and
superstitions of twilight and spectral centuries.
For again we have to note spiritual despotism as
the parent of infidelity through the svuperstition it
produced. Superstition, or the irrational fear of the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.    211
spiritual and unseen, naturally appears when the
reason is dethroned or abandoned in the spiritual
realm. But spiritual despotism in commanding
belief without investigation, and in forbidding the
right of private judgment, effects this dethronement
and abandonment.  Once allow a separation of
faith from evidence, and you have made a breach in
the enclosures of my creed wide enough to let in all
the brood of old night and unreason; ghosts, goblins,
ghouls, omens, auguries, portents, miracles, witchcrafts, visions beatific or infernal, talismanic mysteries, fatuities fantastic or satanic, without number,
come trooping in, through the breach in my reason
made by the intromission of wandering chapels, and
transubstantiated bread and wine, and the thaumaturgic virtues of saintly rags and hair and apostolic
blood and bones.
Spiritual despotism commonly enforces by direct
command the reception of many superstitions; more
it brings on, by the habit of mind it induces. In
proof of the above statement, we have only to glance
at the countries and ages of spiritual despotism.
They are all overcast with phantasm and fear. But
what produces superstition, produces infidelity.
Their realms border on each  other, there is
but a step between, and the intercourse is constant. The illogical reception of a dogma pre



212           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
pares the way for its illogical rejection. If religion
may enter without evidence, so may irreligion. As
I superstitiously, that is, illogically, accept Christianity to-day, so may I with the same illogical habit
admit Atheism to-morrow. H-aving in entering the
realm of superstitious belief, renounced the light and
guidance of my own reason, I am on an open, waste,
dark sea, and know not on what shore I may land.
The consciousness of having received a creed superstitiously will always prepare the mind to cast it
away when caprice or interest prompt.
Thus superstition breaks down the barriers of
rational belief in the mind. It destroys the logical
law and order in the processes of the understanding;
and the intellect becomes in consequence incapable
of consistency or stability in its beliefs or unbeliefs.
Consequently it fluctuates endlessly between childish
credulity and absolute and universal unbelief.
Of this affinity or proximity between superstition
and infidelity, many of the free-thinkers of the French
school of the last century, and especially their great
leader, Voltaire, exhibit striking instances. The men
audacious as the rebel angels against the true God,
cowered at a shadow. The Marquis D'Argens, one
of the philosophers and courtiers of Frederick II.,
Macaulay describes as 1"hating Christianity with a
rancor that made him incapable of rational inquiry,




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.      213
and at the same time the slave of dreams and omens,
refusing to sit down to table with thirteen in company, turning pale if the salt fell toward himself,
begging his guests not to cross their knives and forks
on their plates, and never for the world commencing
a journey on Saturday." The Marquis D'Argens is..only a specimen of a class, a type of the workings of
a great permanent law of mind. According to this
law, we need not be surprised to find an era of skepticism bordering on that of superstition, or each
becoming either, in communities or in the single
mind. Still less shall we be surprised at such commingling, if we consider what effect the spectacle of
superstitions enforced and warranted by the Church,
and servilely received by spiritual slaves, must have
had on the classes not thus receiving them-what
contempt, what an indignation of unbelief such a
spectacle must have provoked.
On the whole it is difficult to imagine a more terrible fountain of unbelief than that hideous or ludicrous ~caricature, which the church of France, under
the auspices of spiritual despotism, was compelled to
make of Christianity before the French mind and
French literati of the eighteenth century!  A religion of intellectual imbecility, ignorance and superstition, united with bigotry and arrogance, opposing
itself to the enlightenment, the reason and philosophy




214          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
of the age! A Church of foul and bloody history,
ulcerous with lusts and corruptions, and venomous
with fanaticism, affronting the moral sense of mankind and the sentiment of natural religion with the
cruelties and absurdities of barbarous ages! what
could be a richer quarry for the infidel wits and
philosophers of that period than a church anathematizing the Baconian philosophy, Warring on natural
reason and the right of private judgment and execrating science! teaching transubstantiation, but ignoring Newton and La Place! and replying to all
doubts and opposing utterances by acts of force and
the brute thunder of ecclesiastic anathema, now contemptible from impotency, and imported from dead
and barbarous eras! a Church which answered geometric demonstration or metaphysical argument with
sentence of excommunication, or settled questions on
natural history by scholastic formularr and pontific
decretals!  Could anything more surely tend to
skepticism than thus arraying science against Christianity, nature against God, and human reason
against revelation, which after all, reason must
receive, if received at all?  What could more certainly produce a sneering unbelief, than the Church
assuming such a position in the presence of the encyclopedists and free-thinkers?  A Church offending
our natural sense of divine equity by unreasonable



SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.      215
ness in the terms and means of God's favor-securing
Heaven with no purity of life through mummeries
and forms and spiritual legerdemain; that attached.
salvation to rosaries and hair shirts.! a Church
which, speaking through her great Italian poet,
freights the first circle of hell with "sighs which
made the eternal. air tremble,"
From grief felt by multitudes many and vast,
Of men, women and infants that of sin
Were guiltless, but for sole defect of baptism
Were lost!
Could such a Church be aught to them but an
object of incredulous contempt? And when that
Church broke a man on the wheel at Toulouse, or
tortured and beheaded a youth for mere indiscretion
at Abbeyille, in the noon of the eighteenth century,
could it be otherwise than that contempt should
deepen to execration and abhorrence a
When moreover that Church came before such a
tribunal as a miracle-monger, a thaumaturgist retailing monkish legends of winking statues and bleeding
fountains and crucifixes fallen from  Heaven, and
exploits of saintly chivalry rivalling in probability
and intellectual reach, if not in taste and interest,
the wonderful stories of Jack the Giant Killer; tales
of St. George and the Dragon, or St. Patrick and the




216          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Serpents, or St. Anthony with fiends foul and fair,
can we wonder that the world laughed outright?
But when lower still, that Church came before
them as a chapman of charms and relics, showman
of dry bones and old clothes, saints' tears and blood,
feathers of the arch-angel Gabriel, holy coats of
Christ made to pontific order, the hair and milk of
the Virgin, with veils, girdles, gowns and other wardrobe enough to set up a haberdasher; heads of John
the Baptist, with teeth of Peter and Paul, and apostolic legs and arms, sufficient to furnish an anatomical museum; and of wood and nails of the holy cross
exhaustless in supply, can we be surprised that at the
spectacle of a Church staggering down the eighteenth century under the burden of such a curiosity
shop —a shout of derision went up from the philosophic corps, till Europe in sympathy shook its sides
from Petersburg to the Sicilian Straits? We must
recollect that by the fatal necessity of her infallibility, that Church could renounce nothing, repent
nothing, amend nothing. With all the trumpery
and pretension, and absurdity of the past cumbered
and bedizzened, not a shred bleached, or a stain
removed from her robes that had trailed through the
foulness and bloodshed of a thousand years, she was
pinioned and pilloried to the derision of all time.
Fatal was the hour for Rome when she put forth the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.     217
claim to be the Infallible.  The infallible is the
immutable.
All retreat was closed up. Each step in her usurpation was upon the round of a ladder that broke as
she rose. There is for her no descent but in a fall
that must dash her in pieces. Still, descend she
must. It were terrible for any institution to be comnpelled to go down all the future bearing the burden
of all the past. It would crush it as under the pressure of fate. How then could the Gallic church go
down through the searching and fiery ordeal of the
eighteenth century without being burned up. But
this Church was to the French nation at large, and
to the peoples of central and southern Europe, yea
even to the philosophers, their all of Christianity.
They hardly knew any other. With such a representative of Christianity, encountering such a literary
cohort as the philosophers and the encyclopedists, is
it strange that in the heart of the French nation
there sprang up a pest of unbelief destined to waste
the world?
There seemed to be wanting, in order to complete
the odiousness and defencelessness of the French
church, only the historical and logical expose', and
the fall, during the period, of the Order of Jesus;
the latter stripping her of her most powerful defenders, after the former had drawn on her the hatred
10




218          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
of mankind for crimes even beyond her own guilt
and turpitude.  Indeed through the creation and
employment of this order as its instrument and
champion, spiritual despotism may be rightly arraigned as being to a fearful extent the guilty cause
of the revolt of the human mind from Christianity
in the eighteenth century. Jesuitism, as far as it
stands before mankind as the representative and
champion of.Christianity, must evidently have
brought on our religion odium and incredulity, by.its utter immorality in theory, policy and practice,
whenever its creed and conduct became known.
No institution known to history has been more daringly, more corruptingly or more impiously immoral;
its creed, a gospel of deceit; its principia a novum
organum of craft-the dialectic of fraud; its chief
-virtue and piety, submission absolute to spiritual
despotism. In its policy and conduct, it scrupled in
compassing its ends no shape, garb or hue, no art,
no measure. It wore the livery of all schools;
humored all caprices, moods, temperaments, opinions
and passions; passed from virtue to vice and from
heroism to meanness with most absolute indifferency; made the end sanctify all means and canonize
all crimes. Its protean facility of change and flexibility of principle was portentous. It could cabal in
the name of all creeds, political and social; could




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.      219
personate all characters; could enact the absolutist
or the servile; the anchorite or the courtier and gallant; the lewd and blasphemous wit, or the austere
devotee and rapt enthusiast. Democrat, aristocrat
and monarchist; the instrument, ally, slave of despotism or the red republican; a sower of rumors,
c9nspirator against monarchy, and assassin of kings
— in all these parts and persons, with equal facility
to suit place, and time, and circle, and country, it
passed before the eyes of men.
Of course such an utter recklessness of principle,
assuming the championship of Christianity, and
sanctioned and canonized by the power claiming to
be its infallible and Heaven-appointed hierophant
on earth-such a recklessness and profligacy  of
principle, we say, thus assuming and thus sanctioned
in the yname of Religion, must-as far as those assumptions and sanctions are admitted-destroy either
the religious faith or the moral sense of mankind.
Religion thus presented shocks the natural conscience.
The foimer cannot find place in the human bosom
till it has expelled the latter.
Such is ever the curse of spiritual despotism.
Through the instruments it is compelled to employ, it
is necessitated to smite nations with a moral plague
or with infidelity; fills them with moral banditti or
spiritual slaves; and establishes its throne only over




220           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
the sepulchre of the conscience or the smothered
crater of volcanic unbelief.  An instrument necessitating such consequences to the French church and
the Romish world, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, was Jesuitism. And its mischiefs were
likely to be extensive and terrible in proportion to
the extent of its sphere andl its _power. But in the
ages previous, the Order of Jesus had possessed itself of all the strongholds which command the public
mind. The pulpit, press, confessional and inquisition, and the academy and university through
Catholic Europe, belonged to it.  Cabinet and
Cathedral were extensively occupied by it. Litera
ture and science were its creatures or its wards. In
colonial adventure and missions, in politics, in
finance, wars, treaties, tariffs, trade and manufactures;
in short, in almost every interest of society the
Jesuit figured. In Austria he was confessor and
master of the bigot Ferdinand II., and abettor of the
thirty years' war; in France the assassin of Henry
IV., keeper of conscience to Charles IX. and
Louis XIV., instigator of the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the revocation of the edict of Nantes; in
Spain he was the evil genius of Phillip II.; in
Holland the murderer of the Duke of Orange; in
England the complotter of midnight cabal, and
regicide conspiracy. The meshes of the policy of




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.      221
the order were all over Europe, and in distant continents. Through its subtle, quick and all-pervading
system of intelligence, it had a constant, universal,
instantaneous consciousness of the world. Through
its centralized administration, its absolute autocracy
and its mechanic obedience, it momnently penetrated
with one adamantine, remorseless, ruthless will its'
vast domain from  Central Europe to China and
California. Its ear and whisper, its eye and hand
were everywhere; everywhere, its intrigue and
police, its poison and stiletto. It was to Christendom
a terrible power; but one which, like the old man of
the sea, could not be shaken off. Odious everywhere
through its cabal and its crimes, feared everywhere
because of its vast, insidious, unprincipled ambition
and influence, aspiring to grasp all interests from
fashion to finance, proscribed at times, in disgust
and exhaustion of endurance, from almost every
court and country in Europe-it had again been recalled as the necessary instrument of the papal and
royalkdespotism of the period we treat of. At length
in its feud with the Jansenists, it committed the
offence unpardonable in Parisian eyes, of showing
itself ridiculous as well as tyrannical and unprincipled. Through his inimitable provincial letters,
Pascal made France and all Europe laugh at it.
The order, too mighty for popes and potentates, was




222           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
impaled on his satire. Finally, when its seals of
secrecy were broken by a judicial procedure and
its books by compulsory process were brought before
the legal tribunal, in a trial where the Jesuits as a
mercantile company were a party, the exposure of
its esoteric creed and rules of practice drew on it the
abhorrence of Christendom. The moral legerdemain
therein displayed, the subtle glazing of sin, the
saturnine coolness of its atrocious sophisms, the impudent naivet6 of its infernal dialectic, divided
Christendom between a shudder and sneer. Jesuitism shrank before the tempest of odium and ridicule
aroused against it, and for a time - disappears befoje
the indignation of mankind. But as by its policy.and achievement in behalf of spiritual despotism, it
had shaken the faith of nations in Christianity; so now
by its fall stripping spiritual despotism of its right
arm of spiritual fraud, and bereaving it of its most
efficient defenders, it broke the strength of that'
tyranny which had essayed thus far to extort a
nominal confession of Christianity from the ghastly
and anguish-wreathed lips of crushed nations. Its
fall broke the seals -of the pit its triumph had
peopled.  The agency  of the Jesuits as nominal
champions of Christianity, associating it with their
infamies, was undoubtedly one reason for that fierce
rage with -which the nations came to regard the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE,      223
religion of Christ. The recoil of an agency so utterly
unprincipled and profligate, when exposed, must have
been terrible against the power that employed it, i. e.
against the Romish church; and in the nations where
she alone represented Christianity, against religion
itself. The shock to faith must have been the more
fatal, the more intimately and pervasively Jesuitisrh
had intertwined itself with the political and social
order of the world, and had poisoned its moral life.
So wide-spread was the cancerous growth, that we
need not wonder its attempted eradication almost
cost the spiritual life of Christendom.
We may not close this view of the rise of infidelity
in France, and its diffusion from her through the
rest of Europe, without adding to all the above
causes, tending to make her during the eighteenth
century the hot-bed of unbelief, the znpcaralleled.preCvalenie there of the money madness of the era. In
France was its especial focus, or at least, owing to
peculiar qualities of the French character, it had like
almost all the passions of modern civilization, its
acme of fever at Paris. The illusions, frauds, corruptions and crimes attendant upon it, there were
stupendous. Like all the vices and follies of the
French character, it seems to have come to its height
under the infamous Regent of Orleans. -Nor can we
wonder that the national mind already alien or indif



224           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
ferent to religion, from many causes, should have
been well-nigh borne clear away when this storm of
Mammonism beat upon it. The world of faith faded.
The world of sight closed around and snared them
in the meanest,, most sordid, materializing of the
passions. The class of infidel economists which arose
and applied the energy of brilliant, sagacious, godless genius to the science of wealth, fitly illustrate
the spirit of the period. The spiritual power-the
Church-which should have stayed the plague,
rather aggravated it.  She even led the way, into
the temple of Mammon. The position and history
of France illustrate the terrible mischiefs which must
accrue when the spiritual power abandons its functions of checking the material and secular tendencies
of modern civilization.
But if we attempt to trace the money plague to its
source, we track its malignancy at last to the same
evil fountain which we have found gushing forth
with skepticism in forms and directions so manifold
over Christendom. The ultimate guilt of this plague
lies with spiritual despotism. Not that she was
answerable for that stage of civilization and social
and historical development that of necessity lifted
the idea of wealth to a new prominence before the
mind of society.  That stage was inevitable; nay
more, was desirable. It was in the line of social




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE.     225
progress. That wealth should rise to a high and
commanding interest amid the forces and objects of
society, was natural; was beneficent.  But that it
should become an epidemic mania, a moral plague,
corrupting the faith and life of nations, was due to
the fact that spiritual despotism had broken the..moral constitution of the world, had slain or enfeebled faith, exhausted the energies of the religious
sentiment by ages of agony and blood, and had left
the world with no conservative or recuperative
power to withstand the invasions of any epidemic
moral disorder. Otherwise, like the nutriment that
in the weak produces fevers, while to the strong it
gives strength, the money interest and passion of the
era in question, might have blent healthfully and
beneficently with the life and forces of modern
society.
Thus through influences such as we have enumerated, have we seen France becoming amid the
nations of Europe the great elaborator and diffuser
of infidelity. Here was its geographic centre and
capital. Here its chief theatre. Here its mightiest
tragedy; its most brilliant and most atrocious exploits; and here its earth-shaking catastrophe. And
from hence, also, as from its Jerusalem, the gospel of
unbelief went forth to dazzle and to darken nations.
Such an elaborator and diffuser, France became, if
10*




226           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
we seek its chief, primary and ultimate cause, in
consequence of the politico-ecclesiasticca  despotism
applied for centuries to the French mind-applied
with force not enough to smother, but only to render
its action within its more confined space more
intense, passionate and explosive; force driving it
from affairs to the discussion and resolution of first
principles and the achievement of results in primary
philosophy, that like the analysis of reputed elementary substances in chemistry, seemed capable of
accomplishment only under great pressure.
In a national mind thus coerced into revolutionary
ways in philosophy, and emerging, wearied, exhausted and disgusted from generations of religious
wars into which the same despotism had impelled it,
we have seen the same evil cause again generating
infidelity by enfeebling and corrupting the spiritual
power; making it incompetent to resist the invasions
of the money-plague or any moral epidemic; betraying it into enormous and suicidal crimes; making it
the slave or showman of debasing and puerile superstitions; associating with it as champion and instrument, an order the most profligate and odious in
Christendom; and presenting it as accomplice of the
Valois and the Bourbons in their unspeakable sins
and shames, and their conspiracies against the liberties of the nation.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE..    227
We have seen the spiritual power under the coercion of spiritual despotism, made to enact this part
in French history in the presence of such an amphitheatre of mind as the world had never seen before,
so witty and so wicked, so unprincipled and so audacious, so terrible in its sneer, so keen in its sense of
the ridiculous, so brilliant and rapid in its apprehension, so daring and irreverent in its analysis.
We have seen this amphitheatre of the French
mind in view of such a spectacle of ecclesiastic' history passing before it, filling all Europe with its
hiss and derision, and ultimately organizing the
erudition, science, fancy, wit and eloquence, most
eminent in Europe, into a conspiracy against Christianity; and then we have seen this moving forth
from Paris as a centre, with a cohort of disciples, confessors, evangelists and apostles, gifted, powerful,
Heaven-defiant and Heaven-hating-with the enthusiasm of a new dispensation and the zeal of new love
and new wrath-towards the overthrow of the "reign
of superstition" the world over. We find the diffusion of this plague of skepticism from France over
Europe powerfully aided, moreover, by the central
and commanding position of France in European
Civilization, presenting her monarchy, court, literature and manners as the model and law for Christen



228          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
dom, and tending to make ideas which had become
French, become ultimately European.
Such in general was the agency of France in producing that eclipse of faith we are investigating.
Through all influences and causes, permeating like
the pulse of an evil heart the entire system, giving
virulent malignant life to all, we find spiritual despotism.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM  IN ITALY.            229
CHAPTER IX.
SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM  IN ITALY AND SPAIN.
ITALY.-Spiritual Despotism a generator of Infidelity in Italy and
Spain-Italian History mutilated and stifled-Its silence significant
-Insurrection of Mind indicated by the measures of RepressionTheir Multitude and Atrocity-Censorships-Proscriptions-Crusades-Massacres-Dominicans-Franciscans-The InquisitionGlimpses of Infidelity in Italian History and Literature-Infidelity
a necessity of Pontifical Htistory applied to the Italian mind-The
Troubadour-Dante-Petrarch-Arnold of Brescia-SavonarolaInfidel Scholars -Monarchs-Popes-Repressive measures of the
Sixteenth Century —Their utter mercilessness- Terror-Silence
-Italy stifled but not believing.
SPAN. —Orthodoxy of Spain-No Spasm in a Corpse-The Inquisition, the instrument of Spanish Faith-Its mystery and terrorWar on Books —Index Expurgatorus — Death struggle of the
Spanish mind, 1559-1570-Spanish Thought, Literature, Civilization, Manhood fall together-Silence not belief-The Peninsula
still seething with insurgent Infidelity-Three Realms of Spiritual
Despotism compared.
CONCLUSION.
Resume of the Argument-Lessons for the Times-Doom of Spiritual Despotism.
BEFORE closing  our review  of the phenomenon
under discussion, in order to the completeness of our
argument of the question of cause as between spiritual liberty and spiritual despotism, or between Pro



230           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
testantism  and Romanism, it ts requisite to take a
brief glance at those countries of Europe -which might
seem  to contrcadict our conclusions, and at which
spiritual despotism sometimes points as monuments
of her conservative power against unbelief-SPAIN
and ITALY. "In Italy and Spain," we are told,'" as
also in Austria and other Catholic countries of Europe,
spiritual despotism prevailed. ]But behold the exemplary and submissive faith of Spain.  Why this?
and why the quiet and steadfastness of the Italian
mind? Behold here the triumph of the Catholic
communion, the peace and unity and endurance in
believing, which it ensures! why, if spiritual despotism be the mother of infidelity, why did she not produce that offspring in the two Peninsulas as well as
in France?" To these inquiries we answer:
First, spiritual despotism alone, without the requisite concomitancy, of course will not assure the
result. It is so with all causes. Their environment
is an essential part of them. Despotism that absolutely stifles thought or expression will not be likely
to breed a clamorous infidelity. The dead will not
catch the plague. The malaria will breed no fever
in a corpse. Yet the plague is contagious, and the
malaria a poisoner.  Our reasonings of the effect of
spiritual despotism, of course imply a living subject.
We expect not madness or spasm in the slain.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY.       231
Secondly, we maintain that spiritual despotism did
produce its legitimate consequences in those countries,
and if skepticism was not as apparent in their history
as in that of France, its suppression accomplished
by the means it has been, is easily explicable, consistently with our main proposition, and has cost those
countries evils, compared with which even the rampant infidelity of France were a lighter curse.
First, then, we charge that spiritual despotism did
produce its natural evil fruit of unbelief in those
countries. In proof, look we first at Italy. There it
produced it even earlier; inasmuch as society there
in all its developments matured earlier, and Rome the
great capital and centre of spiritual despotism, was
nearer; in consequence some of its natural results
were more immediately exhibited.
It id with a feeling of profound melancholy we
pursue this argument through Italian history. That
history is to us ineffably sad, not so much because of
its utterances as its silence. That it speaks so timidly,
so rneagrely, so brokenly, on facts so many, so patent
and so vast as those embraced in the insurrectionary
movements of the Italian mind against the Christian
faith, or at least against the Church; its dumbness,
or speaking below its breath on topics of such tragic
and commanding interest. is among the most affecting and instructive of the facts it exhibits. That we




232           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
have to catch at implication, allusion, obscure hints,
scattered and isolate events, sketches, glimpses, fragmentary narratives, for proof of facts which, if Teal,
ought to have been chronicled with trumpet tongue,
and with accuracy and fullness of blazon for all time,
is in itself the strongest of the proofs we seek. That
we are compelled to eke out evidence from coherent
or causative facts, from unguarded outflashings of
sentiment or passion in the narrator, from the figure
of the poet, the sneer of the satirist, the epigram of
the wit, is painfully significant. Such silence has a
terrible eloquence. That historic record, torn, mutilated, bleared and blotted all over with tears and
blood, what language can speak so much. We seem
to be listening to the broken sobs and hushed breathings of a crushed, writhing  and stifled victim,
exhausted with agony and terror. Could any description so prove the guilt of the "great quell?" the
deadly wrong wrought to the mind of Italy? Ages of
spiritual tyranny, espionage, intimidation and bloody
repression look out on us from that marred and stifled
record. That noble and gifted Italian mind-for centuries it must have been beaten down, awed, gagged
and all but suffocated through all that glorious
peninsula. How terrible and ruthless must have
been the pressure of tyranny to have accomplished
such a result!




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY.      233
We may measure the strength of an upheaving,
by the force requisite to keep it down. So we may
estimate the insurrectionary movement of the Italian
mind against spiritual despotism, by the frightful
measures of repression employed. Thus the ruthless
policy of potentates and hierarchs, the introduction
of the Inquisition into Italy, the institution of the
gloomy orders of the Dominicans and'Franciscans,
(minions of repression), censorships, sanguinary
edicts, proscriptions, imprisonment, exile, murder,
massacre, to what a strength of revolt in the mind
of Italy, were such appliances addressed? yea, each
martyr flame, the axe, the dungeon, the Holy Office,
they have each a terrible significance. All point to
spiritual despotism fastening on beautiful, glorious
Italy, aiming to strangle its soul. We see the weird
and talon fingers on the throat of the victim; we
hear the death rattle; and that is all! Such is the
impression on us of the testimony of Italian literature on our present question.
From causes and facts of which we have indubitable knowledge, we are certified of a formidable
reaction against the spiritual power in Italy, as inevitable. That that reaction took its course toward in-;
fidelity, we also know, not only from the laws of mind
acting in the circumstances, but also from a great
variety of historic testimony, specific or by way of




234           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
direct implication  or allusion.  Evidence of it
glimpses upon us also, whenever the literature of the
drama, the romance, the ballad or satire, or that of
homiletics, politics, judicature or philosophy, lift for
a moment the veil from the muffled national mind.
There is a current strong and distinct as of the
rapids above the cataract. It is as though we stood
near the brink of an abyss, and saw multitudes borne
continually towards its verge; and then disappearing. We need no description or narrative to tell us
what waits beyond. A broken shriek, a mighty
groan caught by snatches wailing up from the
darkness, is enough.  We know death is below.
Such is the evidence for the most part, that comes
to us of infidelity in Italy produced by spiritual
despotism.  We see multitudes borne along  the
dark stream, impelled by forces they are ill able to
resist, to the verge of that fatal steep of skepticism
from which, alas! few of the sons of genius ever return.
There they disappear. They pass into the gloom
and silence of a system of despotic ruthless repression, that lets in no light on its victims, and allows
no ear to listen too nearly to their stifled curse and
groan. A  deep wail, a vast sigh, a death-shriek
breaking up at intervals from the darkness and
silence, fills up the chapter. But we need no more.
The terrible reactive force toward unbelief caused by




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY.     235
spiritual despotism is abundantly proved in Italy,
though most of its utterances have been foully and
bloodily smothered.
That infidelity should spring zup under the shadow
of such thrones as during the mediceval era claimed
to be the seat of God's. vicegerent on earth, as naturally as the poisonous mushroom and night-shade in
the'mephitic damp and dark, there needs neither
history nor prophecy to certify us. Popes foul with
almost all crimes of human nature and those beyond
it, passing before such a mind as that of Italy in the
middle ages and those immediately subsequent, men
lifted to the pontifical chair by the bribery and
violence of bandit nobles, or the favors of frail ladies
of the Roman patricianate, or by ecclesiastic intrigue, conspiracy and simony bidding for the spiritual empire of mankind; men dragging along their
imperial purple and scarlet smeared with rapine,
incest and murder-from the vision of such men as
vicegerents of God, the covert of hideous atheism
itself were a refuge! Monsters like Coesar Borgia
and Alexander V., literary sybarites or paganized
amateurs and dilettanti, like the Sextuses and Leos;
the gloomy fanatacism of the Innocents; the ferocious
bigotry of the Pauls and Victors, the lust and gluttony and homicide of the Benedicts and Johns; and
the political ambition and cabal of the Bonifaces,




236          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Clements and Gregories-these and such a lineage
as to a great extent for ages seized the sceptre of St.
Peter-a lineage where the miser and intriguant, the
debauchee, the fanatic and the assassin, oft succeed
each other, oft seem blent in infernal perfectness of
sin in the same person-such a dynasty sitting in the
seat of God, the infallible expositors and oracles
of the divine word, having the lordship of faith and
morals and the keys of Heaven-such a dynasty of a
kingdom of truth and love, with the crucified Gali-'lean for its founder and the sermon on the Mount for
its fundamental law! such men in such a position!
it were enough to send a tremor of horror or laughter
through the whole earth. A solecism so blasphemous
were enough to draw on it at once the bolts of outraged heaven and the blasts of a world's sneer and
hate.
And when we learn that the lower orders of the
hierarchy and the regular and secular clergy were to
a melancholy degree, to suc/h a pontifieate, "fit body
tofit head;" when we look at the surroundings of
the pontificate, its court thronged with men steeped
through and through with the filth and fraud and
blood of Italian politics in the middle ages, or its
environment with groups ecclesiastical, political or
literary, which seemed to make Papal, like Pagan
Rome, in its origin, a city of refuge among the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY.     237
nations, and to convert the Lateran conclave into a
focus of Machiavellian cabal and conspiracy for all
Europe-it seems like one of the pictures the daring
muse of Dante has hung on the walls of Eternal
Night; it grows on the vision like the palace of
infernal Dis amid its setting of ninefold Hells.
With such a spectacle before the Italian mind,
arrogating to be the high court of Jesus Christ on
earth, intervening between the visions of the million
and the Redeemer, and with bloody and blinding
enforcement compelling the acceptance of itself by
them, as the representative of Christianity, what else
could have resulted than a shudder of unbelief
through the peninsula? " If such," (men must have
reasoned) "if such are God's vicegerents, who then
are Satan's? such the holders of heaven's keys; who
then shall stand at the doors of hell?"
With such necessary induction from known historic
facts and laws of the human mind, we can translate
utterances and facts, which Italian history and literature, spite of inquisition and censorship, have at
times allowed to escape them, significant of a strong,
deep undercurrent of skepticism in the popular
mind, flowing beneath mute or servile ages. We read
in them the indubitable signs of a vast defection from
the Christian faith. With such guides to interpretation, we recognize in the jest of the Tro'ubadour,




238           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
already in the twelfth century, the sneer of the philosopher of the eighteenth. In the sarcasm of Raymond De Castelnau, " if God saves those whose sole
merit consists in loving good living, and handsome
women; if friars the black and white, and templars
and hospitallers win the joys of paradise, great fools
in sooth were St. Andrew and St. Peter, who suffered
so much for what these men win so easily;" in such
utterances, flinging out from time to time in literature, we have assurances that the atrocious solecism
of a religion without morality, was producing its
natural effect of derision and incredulity, toward its
professed representatives, likely to be directed ultimately against the faith itself thus caricatured and
belied..Amid the multitudinous testimony furnished by
Italian literature, turn we a moment to their great
national poets, to the poets rather than the philosophers or even historians, because they more livingly
and with less effective repression of the censor,
reflect the national feeling. Glance a moment at
the great iHomeric oracles of the genius of Italy in
tile middle ages, Dante and Petrarch. Was not spiritual despotism producing a revolt of the Italian mind
from the papal church, a revolt of necessity ultimating in infidelity, to a people shut out from all other
representation of Christianity —when Dante, in his




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM  IN ITALY.         239
wondrous vision, places some of the highest dignitaries of that Church amid reprobates in hell? and
describes Rome as the Babylon of revelations?  How
far from skepticism was the Italian mind, when looking forth on the papacy as representing Christianity,
it utters itself in the Divine Comedia; which poem,
in its nineteenth canto exhibits Pope Nicholas III. in
one of the circles of inferno, suspended with head
downward through certain apertures in the burning
rock, with legs projecting upward and blazing like a
lamp, Iand, in this most unpontifical posture, awaiting
the coming of worse miscreants than himself, Clement
V. and Boniface VIII.  How  far from  infidelity
must that mind be that drew that picture, so far as
popedom, that is, spiritual despotism concreted in
the Romish See, was Christianity.  How far again
from  unbelief was the  same  Italian  mind, thus
expressing itself in another passage in that same
poem, in apostrophe to the papacy:
"Your avarice
Overcasts the world with mourning, under foot
Treading the good and raising bad men up.
Of Shepherds like to you, the Evangelist
Was ware, when her who sits upon the waves
With kings in filthy whoredom, he beheld;
She who with seven heads towered at her birth,
And from ten horns her proof of glory drew.
Of gold. and silver ye have made your God, &c."




240             CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
Proof ample this, of ecclesiastical corruption bred
of spiritual despotism, and sure to breed infidelity, if
not, of infidelity itself.
Was Italy of unruffled faith, again, when  even
the mild Petrarch, member of the ecclesiastical body
and favored resident of the papal court, spite of
ambition, interest, love and gratitude, fled the
Roman court as the spot where he saw crimes of
religious usurpation heightened by the " abandonment
of every virtue?" and when -from his retirement in
Vaucluse he thus raised his revered and dreaded
voice against the corruptions of Rome?' From impious Babylon-from whence
All shame hath fled and every good is gone:
Mother of errors-dwelling-place of grief
I've fled!
May flames from Heaven upon their tresses fall;
O forge of treachery! 0 prison dire!
Death-place of every virtue, nurse of every ill,
Hell of the living! great the miracle
If Christ rouse not at length his tardy ire!
Unblushing wretch! what hope remains for thee?"
These are signs-signs if not of absolute skepticism, of minds verging toward it, and of the presence
of ecclesiastical corruption —the foul birth of spiritual despotism-sure to produce it.
With signs such as these, selected from  poets that




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY.      241
were good churchmen and national oracles in the
Italian literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we are not surprised to find that Luther in his
visit to Rome, in the sixteenth century, was shocked
at hearing expressions of a flippant and sneering
skepticism from beside the altar and under the very
shadows of the Vatican.
With the above causes, in the ecclesiastic condition and constitution of Italy, and the tendencies of
the Italian mind exhibited in its literature, correspond other facts presented in its general history, in
fragmentary form and without logical relation, but
showing evidence of the same movement toward
religious revolt arid skepticism in the Italian mindsuch facts as these for instance; that for ages one
half of Italy were in open and direct warfare with
the papacy; that not only dukes, princes and
military chiefs, but entire principalities and the common people of the cities, defied fearlessly the authority of the supreme spiritual lord of Christendom and
the terrors of the interdicts and excommunication;
that in the chronicles of the different republics and
the lives of the most distinguished Italians for ages —
statesmen, publicists, poets, and philosophers —we
meet with a constant vein of hostility to the professed Head of the Church. Such facts stand before
us as natural consequences of disastrous causes already




242           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
considered, and significant of a profound revolt
against the spiritual power; a revolt which inevitably, in the absence of a knowledge of true Christianity tyrannously hid from Italy by this power,
must have become revolt against Christianity itself. The appearance also of such men as Arnold
of Brescia in the twelfth, and a Savonarola in the
fifteenth century, and such facts as the founding of
the Franciscan and Dominican orders in the twelfth
century, as champions and bulwarks of the Romish
church against perceived dang6rs, and antagonist to
the mental activity and growing intelligence manifested in the Paterini and Albigenses, are exponents
of the same great movement in the Italian mind.
When we are told,.as we are by Sismondi in his
history of Italy (page 70) of Frederic II. the most
brilliant of the iohenstaufens, that while he loved
literature and encouraged learning, founding schools
and universities, and was distinguished for an intellectual suppleness, a taste for philosophy, and a great
independence of opinion, he manifested also a leaning toward infidelity-when we are told. again by
the same author that in Italy, subsequently and
especially after the translation of the books of
Averrhoes, "thinkers throughout Italy were accused
-by priests not only of heresy but of Epicurism and
infidelity," and " the young men of the court of the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY.       243
De -Medici, devoted  to  ancient' literature, were
charged with preferring the religion of the ancient
Romans to that of the Church "- when such statements are presented they do not surprise us.  Such
combination of unbelief with intelligence we should
regard as inevitable in the circumstances of Italian
history in that period.
So, again, when a reliable historic writer states
(Green's Historic studies) that with men of brightest
intellect in Italy in the sixteenth century, religious
investigation terminated in skepticism; and that
notoriously in the epoch of Luther, "not only the
universities of Italy but also the churches were
filled with men whose brilliant talents and profound
learning had not sufficed to save them from infidelity "-such a statement exhibits to.us only a natural
and logical sequence of causes already  known,
springing from the spiritual despotism and ecclesiastic constitution and condition of Italy.  It was a
necessary result, verified by the logic as well as record of history, that Italy should be, as it notoriously was in the sixteenth century, full of unbelieversinfidel princes, courtiers, statesmen, captains, artists,
writers; indeed infidel mornkls, priests, bis/hops, cardinals, turn up everywhere. Yea in the person of
Leo X., as in some popes before and after him, infidelity seems to have sat on the throne of the Romish




244           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
world. Infidelity thus took up its abode in monastery, cathedral, sacristy and oratory, behind the
chancel, yea even beneath the triple crown itself
Thus down into the sixteenth century, despotism
had borne its grapes of Sodom. Rome was startled
in the early part of that century, not by the unbelief
that spread through her like a pontine miasm, but
by finding a faith springing zp that dared to see a
God and believe in a Christ apart from, herself.
Protestantism at length alarmed her, whom atheism
only lulled to a voluptuous repose. She took measures ruthless, awfully summary. She roused from
her soft dream of sensual and intellectual voluptuousness, her engrossment with " choice cookery, delicious wines, lovely women, hounds, falcons, horses,
newly discovered manuscripts of the classics, sonnets
and burlesque romances in the sweetest Tuscan just
as licentious as a pure sense of the graceful would
permit' —from these she roused herself to a banquet
of blood, the noblest blood of Italy. She called in
the Inquisition; and clothed it with powers and
infused into it a spirit that made it a whisper of
horror from Calabria to the Alps. Its adamantine
mercilessness and its impartial cruelties seemed
borrowed of the king of Hell. No rank nor wealth,
nor privilege of republics, nor favor of kings, was
a'safeguard. The timid convert and the enthusiastic




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN ITALY.      245
proselyte were alike exposed to accusation. Cassock
and cowl were no longer a protection; monks were
drawn forth from the secrecy of the cloister; the
learned from the seclusion of their studies; the sanctities of domestic life were violated; superstition
and fear were everywhere.  The stake, the robe of
pitch, the knife, the axe, the rack, the hunt of heretics through the forest and the high Alps, the martyrdoms of famine and flight, of the desolate cave,
the subterranean dungeon and of the midnight Adriatic-these with infernal energy consummated the
work. A deep, voiceless, al-most breathless terror
pervaded Italy. The mind of Italy was strangled in
her gore.
But this silence was not belief. Did Italy though
crushed and strangled, believe the grisly horror standing on her breast, with the sword to her throat, and
calling itself Christianity-did she believe that ogre
to be a God?  From such a religion she would hide
behind eternal night.  No! underneath Italy now
lies an infidelity deep though silent, as her earthquake, till her hour is come, and then destined to be
as terrible. No; Italy is no exception to our general
argument; spiritual despotism did breed skepticism,
she quenched Protestantism  but could not restore
faith. Superstition and infidelity now divide the
Peninsula-twin curses-almost making the emancipation of Italy a despair.




246           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
SPAIN.
Surrc is the vaunted repose of faith spiritual despotism has secured to Italy. Let us now turn a moment
and glance at that other country in Europe, often
appealed to as a monument of the power of spirtual
despotism to save nations from infidelity. Why, it
may be asked, did not SPAIN exhibit the same passionate insurrection against Christianity as the neighboring peoples of Europe during the eighteenth century.? We answer as in case of Italy, for the same
reason that the blinded see no startling sights; that
a man in chains and prison is guilty of no highway
robbery; that a corpse is not troubled with convulsion and fever. Spiritual despotism excluded infidelity as the grave shuts out delirium. The secret of
this exclusion, the instrument alike of Spanish and
of Italian orthodoxy is found in one word-that word,
the ultimate logic of spiritual despotism-a word
most hateful, hideous, accursed in the vocabulary of
modern history-the INQUISITION; the panacea for
heresy that cures by killing. It suppressed infideity
by stijfling the Spanish mind. Whenever that mind
has revived, on the removal of the suffocating pressure of the holy office, unbelief, as in the last age,
immediately sprang up again. In the era of the
French Revolution infidelity crossed the Pyrenees
before the columns of Napoleon.




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN SPAIN.      247
This terrible engine for crushing the minds of
nations, the inquisition, was, strange to relate, introduced into Spain by the heroic and gentle Isabella
in 1481. It was probably the most frightful and
effective instrument of intellectual repression ever
invented by man. In the first year of its existence,
in the single province of Andalusia alone, it burned
two thousand victims, in addition to seventeen
thousand who suffered a less severe punishment than
the stake. " All its action," says Ticknor, " was in
secrecy and in darkness. From the moment when
the inquisition laid its grasp on the object of its suspicions, no voice was heard to issue from its cells,
Often the victim was never after heard of. He disappeared from men. Men's minds were appalled.
Imagination was filled with horror at the idea of a
power so vast, so silent, so omnipresent, and which
killed by a blow from out an impenetrable gloom.
Soon its warfare was turned against the thoughts of
men, even more than their external crimes. The
intellectual and cultivated peculiarly felt the sense of
personal security more and mnore shaken. They
resisted only to perish."
Its next step was a war on books.  When the,
Lutheran reform broke out, and seemed to threaten
Spain, 1521, then fulminated forth from Rome the
edict agatinst /5panish thouAght; war especially was




-248         CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
declared against Lutheran books. The Grand Inquisition immediately issued orders for search and
seizure of all heretical books. Already, in 1496, the
inquisition under Torquemada had burned large
quantities of Hebrew bibles, and other manuscripts
at Seville, as Jewish writings. It now claimed the
right of examining all books and determining what
might be published. In 1526, was published in
Spain the first Index  Expurgatorius, with denunciation by Philip II. of confiscation and death against
any person who should sell, or buy, or keep in
possession, any book prohibited by that index.
There was now a direct death-grapple with the
intellectual life of Spain. It was as though the
horrid instrument of torture, called the "Maiden,"
invented and applied by the inquisition to the bodies
of men, was with the embrace of its arms of steel
and its dagger-fingers, applied to the Spanish soul.
Such was the infernal pitilessness with which the
murder of the Spanish mind was prosecuted. The
contest was terrible, but brief. In ten years, from
1559 to 1570, Protestanism was smothered in its own
blood throughout the Spanish peninsula. Minds the
noblest and loftiest in it, perished, and elements that
might have saved Spain ages of superstition, and
irreligion, and shame, were eliminated from  the
Spanish civilization. By a brief of Pope Paul IV.,




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN SPAIN.      249
15i8, the inquisition was required to proceed against
all suzspectedpersons, be they bishops, archbishops,
cardinals, dukes, kings, or emperors; a power the
most terrible ever created against progress, in the
history of mankind. The auto da f6, followed at Valladolid and elsewhere.  " The number of victims was
not large compared with earlier periods; seldom more
than twenty being burned at once."  "But among
these were the leading active minds of the age."
" Men of learning," says Ticknor, "were peculiarly
obnoxious to suspicion, since the cause of Protestantism appealed directly to learning for its support.
Sanchez, the best classical scholar of his time in Spain,
Louis de Leon, the best Hebrew critic and most eloquent preacher, and Miranda, the chief Spanish histotorian, with other men of letters, were summoned
before the inquisition. No rank or position, or holiness, or circumstances pof life, exempted from mistrust, if they but showed a tendency to inquiry."
Thus was the deadliest and guiltiest of crimes man
canecommit attempted on Spain, the massacre of its
intelligence, reason and thought. The great purpose
of spiritual despotism was in ten years accomplished,
at least further than in any other Christian country
before or since.
The policy of repression and expulsion of religious
dissent, was followed up with atrocious ruthlessness.
11*




250           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
The tiger-appetite of fanatacismn roused in the infernal game, was never allowed to slacken. The expulsion of six hundred thousand Moors, the most peaceable and industrious of Spanish subjects, is merely
one of its waymarks. 8panrish manhood perished
under its dreadful pressure. Soon all writers and
books show marks of utter intellectual subjugation.
" From the abject title pages and' dedications,'" says
Ticknor,' of the authors themselves, through crowds
of certificates collected from friends, to establish the
orthodoxy of works as little connected with religion
as fairy tales, down to the colophon supplicating
pardon for any unconscious neglect of the authority
of the Church, or any too free use of clacsscal
m-zythology, we are continually oppressed with painfrl proofs, how completely the human mind was
enslaved in Spain."  The natural consequences
ensued. Life and power, with freedom, soon passed
from the Spanish character. With its loyalty and
dignity, its earnest faith likewise perished. Spain
shrivelled and wasted as by a slow plague; from the
position of the proudest and noblest nation in Europe,
threatening the earth with universal empire, she
sank, almost within a single life of man, to feebleness,
servility, and almost to utter dissolution. No nation
in Christendom had fallen from such a height of
power to such an abyss of degradation. Spiritual




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN SPAIN.     251
despotism had struck her from her very " pride of
place," down for ever; and applied to her the
vampire embrace of the inquisition, till she lay prostrate, bloodless, faint and dying, her breath of agony
hushed under a vast fear. Intellectual independence
and manly freedom, were crushed, chained, and
starved to death. The commonest forms of truth
were excluded; the human mind pined and. dwarfed
for want of nourishment. The great sciences, both
moral and physical, that for a century had been
illumining and quickening the rest of Europe, were
unable to force their way through " the jealous
guard, which ecclesiastical and political despotism
had joined, to keep for ever watching at the gates of
the Pyrenees."  All instruction not approved by the
Church, was treated as dangerous. At the university
no elegant learning was fostered, save such as was
fitted to form  scholastic churchmen and faithful
Catholics. The physical and exact sciences were
carefully forbidden, except so far as they could be
taught on the authority of Aristotle. The scholastic
philosophy continued to be regaTded as the highest
form of intellectual culture. Diego de Torres tells
us, it was by mere accident, after having been five
years at the university of Salamanca, the first in the
kingdom, that he learned even the existence of the
mathematical sciences. The common forms of know



252          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
ledge, were to an incredible extent kept out of the
country. On the other hand, errors, follies, absurdities, sprang up and abounded. Astrology, celestial
portents, and disastrous influences of comets, were
universal superstitions in Spain, in the beginning of
the eighteenth century; while the system of Copernicus was forbidden to be taught as contrary to the
scriptures; and the philosophy of Bacon, with all its
fruits was " unknown."
Even as late as 1785, Ensenuado as minister of
State made report to Charles the VII., as follows,
"There is not a professorship of piublic law or of
experimental science, or of Anatomy or of Botany
in the kingdom!  We have no exact Geographical
maps of the country (in 1785!!) or of its provinces,
nor anybody who can make them, so that we depend
on France and Holland, and are shamefully ignorant of the true relations and distances of our own
towns."  So in 1771 Salamanca answered to Charles
VII. urging the universities to change their ancient
habits, and teach the physical and exact sciences,
"[Newton teaches nothing that would make a good
logician or metaphysician, and Gossendi and Des
Cartes do not agree so well with revealed truth as
Aristotle does."
But enough, we see what the boasted exemption
of Spain fromn infidelity amounted to; and what it has




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN SPAIN.      253
cost, and how it was effected. It has cost the intellectual and moral life, the enlightenment, the dignity, and " earnest fait/h" of the Spanish mind; and
to the nation, its greatness and glory of character
and empire. Its fruits are still discernible not only
in decrepid, prostrate, distracted, impoverished, darkminded Spain, with the fanaticism and crime of its
millions, and the indescribable corruption and imbecility of its court; but in the vast and magnificent
climes of this continent, over which the shadow of
her empire and soul have fallen like the wing of the
dark angel. Nor has this suicidal policy saved her
even from unbelief. It tmust have generated it deep
in the soul of Spain.  Signs unmistakable mani*fested themselves in the era of the French revolution
in spite of the inquisition; even before, with the
eagle2s of Napoleon, it penetrated the Pyrenees and
lighted on the Escurial. And at this hour the mind
of the Peninsula seethes in its deeps, with fanatic
and abject superstition in fermenting combination
with a wrathful, and libertine infidelity.
As, therefore, we inquire, how and with what consequence spiritual despotism has kept her arrogated
charge of the world's faith, we are summoned by the
muse of history to follow her at the close of the eighteenth century to the heights of the Alps and the
Pyrenees, and look out on three historic landscapes —




254           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
realms of that despotism and the fairest climes of
Europe. Standing there we look northward, and lo,
a nation burns! monarchy, church, society, sink in
the mighty conflagration. The fires of ruin -are on
throne, tower and temple. We seem to be looking
at the opening of the sixth seal of the Revelation.
The central scene is a vast mad-house where all the
maniacs have broken their chains, burst their cells,
and are burning their prisons; and the furies of the
crimes of a thousand years, from many a red field of
fight and massacre-from Bastiles and holy offices
and sunless cells gloomy with midnight murder —
hover over the revel of madness and death, scattering phrenzy and flame.  "Lo!" says the muse of
history, " one achievement of spiritual despotism."
Faith she slew; but Atheism and Anarchy arose
-from its blood, avengers! Lo their Saturnalia! They
drag herself to the funeral-pyre of her slain, and
burn her in the conflagration she has prepared.
We look southward to the Spanish Peninsula, and
lo! a land of silence and darkness and the shadow
of death; "where the light is as darkness!" The
dead are there. A ghostly terror, like that seen of
Satan at the gates of Hell, sits alone in the gloom.
Life, intellect, manhood, strength, honor, together
with faith, lie in those living tombs at her feet, over
which she keeps ward for ages; brandishing the




SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM IN FRANCE-ITALY-SPAIN. 255
terrors of the earthly sword and the pangs of eternal
fire. " Lo," says the historic muse, " Lo, spiritual
despotism  keeping out infidelity from Spain! ]Her
victims in their deep sleep have no fever.  There is
no delirivtm in the grave."
We turn to that other land-the land of ancient
story-clime of glory and of strength.  We hear
only a deep respiration as from the dungeon of ages!
a mighty sigh as from  a great people in mortal
agony! We look, and lo, a nation faint and prostrate! with diadem and sceptre and broken sword
and lyre in the dust beside her; the memories of
empire and genius on her pale and haughty brow!
Lo, there she lies, together with her glorious children
-art, eloquence, philosophy and song, as well as
faith, gasping under the ever-tightening folds of spiritual- despotismn-a Laocoon in the grasp of the
Python!' Lo" again says the historic muse-" 1o
spiritual despotism protecting Italy from inf delity."




256          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
CONCLUSION.
RESUME OF THE ARGUMENT.
THs have we discussed as we have been able, in
the course of our brief survey, our proposed theme,
THE INFIDELITY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.  We
have endeavored to describe and trace to its causes,
that portentous eclipse of the faith of the world;
have considered its relations to the religious wars of
the previous historic period, the dethronement of the
religious idea and the rise of Mammonism to the
ascendency in European civilization; its relations to
the revolution in philosophy, and the emancipation
of mind in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and to the despotisms, political and ecclesiastical,
over Europe during the same period; and finally, to
the peculiar position of France in European civilization and the elements in her constitution and history,
generative and diffusive of infidelity.  The great
cause —the cause of causes-of the fearful phenomenon we are analyzing, we have found to be not
liberty in any form, but SPIRITUAL DESPOTISM;
wielded by monarchy or hierarchy and commonly




RESUME OF THE ARGUMENT.           257
by both, holding up a Church, made by this despotism imbecile, corrupt and tyrannical, between the
world and Jesus Christ, and thus darkening the faith
of nations.
In closing our review of this theme we wish to
call attention to one most solemn aspect of it. In
attempting to trace the great defection of Christendom from the Christian faith during the last two
centuries, we think we find, as was indicated in a
former chapter, their causes to be rather practical
than speculative, more moral than intellectual, less
theological than ecclesiastic. fThe religious insurrection of nations was political and social, rather than
metaphysical.  Their revolt.was less from Christianity than the Churchh; or at least was from  Christianity because of the Church. It was less a quarrel
with dogma than with life, or it was with dogma
because of life. So it was then: so it is now, and so
it will be to the end. The world will read the living
epistles of Christianity, more than even the written
word. And its faith will be determined by the
exhibition Christianity may make of itself in the life
of individuals, communions and communities, more
than in the schools of philosophy, or the halls of
theologic debate. And we venture to predict that if
the faith of the world ever suffers again a similar
disaster, it will be from similar causes; it will be




258           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
not on pantheism, materialism, fatalism, pelagianism, but on some great {MORAL APOSTASY OR PRACTICAL
WRONG, that primarily at least, it will be shipwrecked. Christianity then seemed to have allied itself
with-atrocious wrongs in society, to have become the
champion of old and intolerable abuses and absurdities. And as men could not but distrust a religion
which seemed to be in conflict with their conscience
and moral sense, so they were compelled to hate one
which threw itself across the path of human progress,
opposed itself to social ameliorations.and conspired
with the oppressors and liberticides of the world.
Not the least fearful now, amid the signs of the
times, are.the present social aspect and aim of infidelity. Its dream and passion in both this country
and Europe is not more a theologic than a social
revolution. It rejects Christianity less because of
the dogmas of the trinity; atonement, predestination,
thanc its championship or. indulgence of political or
social wrongs. The human heart indeed may hate a
religion that curbs its lusts. But until it can mask
th/at hatred behind some palpable wrong or absurdity,
it will be little likely to make much show of its
hate; much less make it the nucleus of any extensive infidel combination or conspiracy. If we would
utterly discomfit infidelity, we must take from  it
such masks. Christianity must be the great leader




RESUME OF THE ARGUMENT.          259
and guardian of reform, the religion of melioration,
emancipation, and progress. Ceasing to be this, she
draws on herself the incredulity and wrath of nations.
Condemned by the moral judgment of mankind
which she has herself instructed, she will be rejected
of them; and society moving forward on a course of
godless reform, will find itself embarked on an endless' cycle of bootless revolution, convulsion and
ruin.
The chief malign influence, which has thrown the
spiritual power in society on a- wrong course and
placed it in a wrong position, as we have oft repeated and cannot urge too earnestly, has been that of
spiritual despotism.  True, we see infidelity spring
upon society from many causes. But she is seen
giving malignancy and, to a great extent, origin to
all others.
Infidelity gashes upon Europe with the bloodshed
of one hundred and fifty years of religious wars.
But who opened that terrible wound in Christendom?
Spiritual despotism. Infidelity arose upon Europe
from the great philosophic revolution of modern
history. But what made a revolution in itself so
beneficent and essential to the progress of society, so
disastrous in its consequences to religious faith?
Spiritual despotism. Infidelity again, with the rise
and ascendency of the idea of wealth, diffused itself




260           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
through European civilization. But what made the
ascendency of that idea so fatal to religious belief?
And what made the golden stream, that poured on
European society, with consequences so happy and so
brilliant to other interests, so deadly to this? Spiritual
despotism. The same evil cause we find also affecting
disastrously the intellect, morals and manners of the
spiritual order, and of the subject nations. Also,
by presenting Christianity with a false aspect as a
religion of force and cruelty, and fraud, and placing
it in a false position as an ally of political despotism,
and social wrongs, it draws on her the incredulity and
rage of the oppressed millions. We have found her
also, by investing the Church with the Nessian purple
of her infallibility, converting it to an eternal conservator of all the lies, follies, mummeries, superstitions
and crimes of the past; and obliging it to pass with
all these before the derision of the ages, an apostle of
unbelief to all the future.
Thus as between despotism and liberty, as was first
started in this discussion, the question of comparative guilt in the great apostasy of the European
mind from the Christian faith, admits but of one and
that an obvious solution. That solution we think
one of grave import to the two great philosophic
and ecclesiastic schools, that are contending for the
possession of modern  society, and the modern




ESSENTIAL SPIRIT OF ROMANISM.       261
Church; which schools find their embodiment and
representation in Romanism  and Protestanism, in
the essentially distinctive imports of these terms.
Romanismn is the incarnation or organization of the
principle of spiritual despotism. This is the central
organic principle, to which all its environment of
rites, forms and orders, is but accident or incident.
Of'Protestanism  on the other hand, in its ultimate
essence, the life principle is spiritual liberty. All
violations of this principle calling themselves by its
name, are abuses and misnomers. Between Protestantism and Romanism, as properly representing their
distinctive essential principles and different philosophic schools, the question of comparative blame for
the " eclipse of faith " in the last century, admit of
no hesitancy; between them as representing different historic parties the question becomes greatly
changed. Still our answer though not as absolute,
must be the same. The guilt of that shipwreck of
the faith of the world, must be laid at the doors of
that Uhurch, that is the great embodiment of spiritual despotism on earth, and claims to be spiritual
sovereign of mankind. To this grave charge she
must plead at the bar of History and of God. Nor
may any disposition to merge essential antagonisms
and veil crimes of the past, in an era of universal
good feeling, avail to silence this fearful arraignment,




262           CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
or screen her from the just indignation of the human
race. While toward the men that are in her communion we would deal in all kindness and all charity,
and would yield to none in love -and admiration of
the pure and noble names connected with it, the
justice of history, the majesty and sanctity of truth,
and principles that partake of the eternity and awfulness of God, will not allow us to forget that the
organic cand central rnciple of that Church is one
of the deadliest and most malignant plagues that
ever broke from the infernal pit to curse our world.
with that principle the world can have no peace till
it has driven it back to its own dark den again. The
earth will be rent and torn till it is cast out. With
any system, any Church, enshrining that principle,
civilization and Christianity must wage perpetual
war. Such a Church, though it wear the awe of
vast ages; though the cloud of one'thousand years
veil its mysterious dome; though saintly faces without number look on you from painted window and
pictured ceiling, and stories of heroic and martyr
piety are lettered and figured all over the marble
column and frescoed wall'; and music like'rift of
angelic anthem, breathes through its "long-drawn
aisles and fretted vaults;" yea, though the names of
David, and Job, and Isaiah were there, nothing can
save it. Against it all the human race will fight,




ITS MALIGNITY.             263
against it all the true Church on earth; against it
all the angels of God. The temple of all the muses,
and the graces, and the virtues-let spiritual despotism once enter as tutelar genius, it becomes ultimately a cage of all doleful creatures. That spirit,
wherever found, we believe to be essentially and
immortally malignant, hateful to man and God; forbidding with itself all truce and all compromise;
rending and tearing the earth till it is cast out. And
into whatsoever ecclesiastic body it shall enter to
possess it, we believe that body is destined to be
hated of God and of all good and wise men, and
that the saints shall war upon it and slay it, and burn
it with fire.
As we close the discussion of our theme, we feel
that the entire scope of the argument we have traversed, the general principles and inductions derived
from it, and the scenes and facts of history adduced,
all turn the eye in one direction in awe and fear.
Toward one power calling itself of God, " sitting in
the se'at of God," the mind looks in fear of the things
which both revelation and the philosophy of history
announce as about to come upon her. Long since
from bloody and woeful ages went up against her a
cloud of accusation to the throne of God, crying out,
"How long, 0 Lord, holy and true, dost thou not
avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?"




264          CAUSE OF INFIDELITY.
But now we hear another voice added to those
under the altar-a cry from the darkened million
in the deeps below her stupendous cathedrals-a
blinded Agonistes groping in agony of revenge
and despair " for the pillars," and exclaiming,
"Strengthen me, I pray Thee, this once, 0 God, that
I may be avenged for my two eyes." Indeed that
power must stand arraigned at the bar of history, of
the crime of almost quenching the spiritual vision of
a century, and that century one of the most powerful
and brilliant in human annals. When we look at
these thickening accusations of history against that
power, giving up so many ages, and believe a God
of history, though long He hideth Himself, still
dwelleth on high, terror takes hold of us. Already
there seems to us a fearful convergency of signs in
the aspect o~the times, and in the Book of God, looking toward her; that a day tempestuous with the
long-stayed anger of God and the indignation of the
human race, hastens. And when it burns on her
proud structures, amid all her names of blasphemy
that shall be made to kindle and to stand out upon
her in letters of fire to the scorn and hate of Earth
and Heaven, not least amid title of arraignment and
sentence on her brow, shall flame out, MOTHER OF
INFIDELITY.
THE END.