that is constant;
and yet thou wouldst claim that thy species can never disappear, and
must be excepted from the great universal law of incessant change!

We may pause for a moment to notice how, in their deliberate humiliation
of the alleged pride of man, the orthodox theologian and the atheistic
Holbach use precisely the same language. But the rebuke of the latter
was sincere; it was indispensable in order to prepare men's minds for
the conception of the universe as a whole. With the theologian the
rebuke has now become little more than a hollow shift, in order to
insinuate the miracle of Grace. The preacher of Naturalism replaces a
futile vanity in being the end and object of the creation, by a fruitful
reverence for the supremacy of human reason, and a right sense of the
value of its discreet and disciplined use. The theologian restores this
absurd and misleading egoism of the race, by representing the Creator as
above all else concerned to work miracles for the salvation of a
creature whose understanding is at once pitifully weak and odiously
perverse, and whose heart is from the beginning wicked, corrupt, and
given over to reprobation. The difference is plainly enormous. The
theologian discourages men; they are to wait for the miracle of
conversion, inert or desperate. The naturalist arouses them; he supplies
them with the most powerful of motives for the energetic use of the most
powerful of their endowments. "Men would always have Grace," says
Holbach, with excellent sense, "if they were well educated and well
governed." And he exclaims on the strange morality of those who
attribute all moral evil to Original Sin, and all the good that we do to
Grace. "No wonder," he says, "that a morality founded on hypotheses so
ridiculous should prove to be of no efficacy."[153]

[153] Ch. xi.

This brings us to Holbach's treatment of Morals. The moment had come to
France, which was reached at an earlier period in English speculation,
when the negative course of thought in metaphysics drove men to consider
the basis of ethics. How were right and wrong to hold their own against
the new mechanical conception of the Universe? The same question is
again urgent in men's minds, because the Darwinian hypothesis, and the
mass of evidence for it, have again given a tremendous shake to
theological conceptions, and startled men into a sense of the
precariousness of the official foundations of virtue and duty.

Holbach begins by