the new Church," and Condorcet, Mirabeau, Robespierre, its "fiery apostles." * "Robespierre is also pronounced to be "the great preacher of the Declaration of the Rights of Man ;" and the Encyclopædists are described as " a new order,"+" bound by the new vows of poverty, truth, and liberty," § and destined, happily, to replace the Society of Jesus. "The best men of the eighteenth century," Mr. Morley avers, were possessed by "a furious antipathy against the Church, its creeds, and its book;" just as the best men of the first century had their spirits stirred within them when they saw fair cities wholly given to idolatry. He describes Catholicism a hundred years ago, in language which recalls St. Paul's account of the heathen world, as a true Chimera, a Monster sodden in black corruption, with whom in the heart of a humane man there could be no terms." ¶ He is of opinion that "the Church was the most justly abhorred of all institutions." ** On the other hand, as St. Peter discerned in his disciples "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood," "called out of darkness into admirable light," so does Mr. Morley discern in Diderot and his allies "the great party of illumination," ++ "a new priesthood," ‡‡ upon whose "lawful authority" he insists, attributing to them "more generous moral ideas and higher spirituality."§§ Does the astonished reader stare and gasp at seeing "moral ideas" and "spirituality" ascribed to bestial materialists like Diderot and his crew? Let him possess his soul in peace awhile. We shall see by-and-bye that Mr. Morley uses the words "spirituality" and "morality" in a new sense. Pass we on to observe that Mr. Morley considers the aspiration of the gluttonous and obscene blasphemers, who assembled round the Baron d'Holbach's table, for the destruction of "not merely the superstitions which had gathered round the Christian dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception," to be "a not ungenerous hope." ||| And his chief complaint against the men of the First Revolution is, that their means to this end were not well chosen, but "led to a mischievous reaction in favour of Catholicism." ¶¶ But I must quote Mr. Morley at length on this subject, for so alone can justice be done to the vigour of his thought and the charm of his manner. On the 10th of November 1793-or, out of compliment to Mr. Morley,

Miscellanies," vol. ii. p. 172.

Ibid. p. 129. §§ Ibid. p. 131.

+ Ibid. vol. i. p. 48.
§ Ibid. p. 125.

.6

"Voltaire," p. 224.

tt "Diderot," vol. i. p. 9.

"Rousseau," vol.ii.p.256.

Diderot, vol. ii. p. 165. At p. 187 of the same volume he expresses the opinion that "the smoke of the flaming châteaux went up as a savoury and righteous sacrifice to heaven."

let us give the date of the revolutionary calendar, the 21st of Brumaire, year II.-took place in the cathedral of Notre Dame the famous Feast of the Goddess of Reason, ordained by the Commune of Paris at the instance of Chaumette. It is hardly necessary for me to recall the details of the function: how a wellknown prostitute, Mdlle. Candeille, " of the Opera," presented the goddess, and was exhibited on a cloud made of pasteboard, with a pike in her hand, and the sacred red nightcap on her head-it was almost her only clothing-as the living image of the new divinity; how a lamp, representing Truth, burned before her; how her breechesless adorers (les sans-culottes) sang in her honour a hymn written by Chenier, to a tune composed by one Gossec, a musician much in vogue then; how they proceeded subsequently to celebrate mysteries, "seemingly of a Cabiric or even Paphian character," writes the historian, which, following his prudent example, I will "leave under the veil." I need not say that Chaumette and his friends of the Commune-worthy predecessors of the present municipal rulers of Paris-did not confine themselves to thus persuasively recommending "the more generous moral ideas and higher spirituality" of the new faith. They also vigorously resorted to the civil sword. And now let us hear Mr. Morley upon them:

In the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided by Hébert and Chaumette, made their memorable attempt to extirpate Christianity in France. The doctrine of D'Holbach's supper-table had for a short space the arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal power on its side. It was the first appearance of dogmatic atheism in Europe as a political force. This makes it one of the most remarkable moments in the Revolution, just as it makes the Revolution itself the most remarkable moment in modern history. The first political demonstration of atheism was attended by some of the excesses, the folly, the extravagances that stained the growth of Christianity. On the whole, it is a very mild story compared with the atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of Catholicism. The worst charge against the party of Chaumette is, that they were intolerant, and the charge is deplorably true; but this charge cannot lie in the mouth of persecuting churches. Historical recriminations, however, are not very edifying. Let us raise ourselves into clearer air. The fault of the atheists is, that they knew no better than to borrow the maxims of the Churchmen; and even those who agree with the dogmatic denials of the atheists-if such there be-ought yet to admit that the mere change from superstition to reason is a small gain, if the conclusions of reason are still to be enforced by the instruments of superstition. Our opinions are less important than the spirit and temper with which they possess us, and even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in a broad, intelligent, and spacious way. Now, some of the opinions of Chaumette

were full of enlightenment and hope. He had a generous and vivid faith in humanity. . . . . One can understand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of the Church. But then, to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the same abhorrence as had befallen the old system of darkness. . . . . Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the Goddess of Reason under the great sombre arches of the cathedral of Our Lady, Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calculation of the conditions.

We

You, he might have said to the priests—you have so debilitated the minds of men and women by your promises and your dreams, that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the yoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall be generations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advantage that you can get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple among you. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to the poisoned weapons of your profession and your traditions-its bribes to mental indolence, its hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its tyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menace at the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and still humanity will escape you; still the conscience of the race will rise away from you, still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose will go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfed finality and leaden, moveless stereotype. shall pass you by on your flank, your fieriest darts will only spend themselves upon air. We will not attack you as Voltaire did. We will not exterminate you; we shall explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from being a guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a chapter in a book. As history explains your dogma, so science will dry it up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of the daily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate will gradually deprive your symbols of your nourishment, and men will turn their backs upon your system, not because they confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair, and well laden with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than the ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the bay, down your ship will sink, like lead or like stone, to the deepest bottom." *

This passage affords an admirable specimen of Mr. Morley's controversial method. It will be observed that he is "replete with mocks, full of comparisons and wounding flouts" as Voltaire

himself. I shall give a few more samples of his skill in this art of "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer."

First, take the following, in which a parallel is more than hinted at between Voltaire and the Divine Founder of Christianity" Voltaire had no calm breadth of wisdom. It may be so. There are movements which need, not this calm breadth of wisdom, but a two-edged sword; and when the deliverers of mankind are those who come to send fire on the earth."*

Mr. Morley, to whose intimate acquaintance with the letter of the Sacred Scriptures every page of his writings bears witness, must be well aware who it was that said, "I have come to send fire upon the earth."

Again, complaining of the prominence given to the base and contemptible squabbles which fill so large a space in Voltaire's life, he asks: "Why, after all, should men, from Moses downwards, be so cheerfully ready to contemplate the hinder parts of their divinities?"†

Once more. In his brief and garbled account of the VoltaireHirsch lawsuit-" nowhere in the annals of jurisprudence is there a more despicable thing," Mr. Carlyle rightly judges — Mr. Morley is obliged to own that his spiritual father proved himself an accomplished forger and a hardy perjurer. But he finds in the Apostolic College of the old faith a precedent at least for the perjury, which thus, under his skilful manipulation, becomes one of "the signs of an apostle": "When very hard pressed, Voltaire would not swerve from a false oath any more than his great enemy the Apostle Peter had done."§

In an article in his "Miscellanies" Mr. Morley quotes M. Taine's opinion-which is the opinion of every sane thinker that Jean-Jacques' "Contrat Social" "is very poor stuff." By way of reply, Mr. Morley observes that the Epistles and Gospels of Christianity are very poor stuff too. Here is the

passage:

M. Taine shows, as so many others have shown before him, that the "Social Contract," when held up in the light of true political science, is very poor stuff. Undoubtedly it is so. And Quintilianan accomplished and ingenious Taine of the first century-would have thought the Gospels and Epistles and Augustine and Jerome and Chrysostom very poor stuff indeed, compared with the

Mellifluous streams that watered all the schools

Of Academics, old and new, with those

Surnamed Peripatetics, and the sect

Epicurean, and the Stoic severe.

*"Voltaire," p. 43.

of it..

See his ""

+ Ibid. p. 101.

Friedrich," book xvi. c. 7, for a full and impartial account § "Voltaire," p. 206.

And in some ways, from a literary or logical point of view, the early Christian writers could ill bear this comparison.*

Is it possible to throw dust in the eyes of the confiding reader with a more engaging air of philosophic moderation?

In the same vein, in his book on "Rousseau," speaking of the very nauseous matter, conveyed in a very nauseous manner, in certain too famous passages of that philosopher's "Confessions," he observes: "This morbid form of self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation." And he adds: "Blot out half-a-dozen pages from Rousseau's "Confessions," and the egotism is no more perverted than in the "Confessions" of Augustine." +

Sometimes comparison is used by Mr. Morley for the purpose of directly recommending that "more generous morality" by which he would supersede the received ethical doctrines"the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics," he calls them. Thus, after allowing that "no word is to be said in extenuation of Rousseau's crime" in sending his new-born children, one after another, to the Foundling Hospital, he proceeds:

At any rate, let Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen, sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far more disastrous and demoralizing than the absence of it in public institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum, on the one hand, or in the degradation of a poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give people who act as Rousseau acted all that credit for self-denial and high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of religious unction. §

** Miscellanies," vol. iii. p. 278.

"Rousseau," vol. ii. p. 303. So in the next page: "No monk or saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous selffeeling." "Rousseau," vol. i. p. 127.

"Rousseau," vol. i. p. 6.