remedies, those expiations, prayers, sacrifices,
fastings, processions, that all the peoples of the earth have so vainly
opposed to the woes that overwhelmed them?... Let us recognise the plain
truth, then, that it is these supernatural ideas that have obscured
morality, corrupted politics, hindered the advance of the sciences, and
extinguished happiness and peace even in the very heart of man."

* * * * *

Holbach was a vigorous propagandist. Two years after the appearance of
his master-work he drew up its chief propositions in a short and popular
volume, called _Good sense; or Natural Ideas opposed to Supernatural_.
His zeal led him to write and circulate a vast number of other tractates
and short volumes, the bare list of which would fill several of these
pages, all inciting their readers to an intellectual revolt against the
reigning system in Church and State. He lived to get a glimpse of the
very edge and sharp bend of the great cataract. He died in the spring of
1789. If he had only lived five years longer, he would have seen the
great church of Notre Dame solemnly consecrated by legislative decree to
the worship of Reason, bishops publicly trampling on crosier and ring
amid universal applause, and vast crowds exulting in processions whose
hero was an ass crowned with a mitre.

CHAPTER VII.

RAYNAL'S HISTORY OF THE INDIES.

"Since Montesquieu's _Esprit des Lois_," says Grimm in his chronicle,
"our literature has perhaps produced no monument that is worthier to
pass to the remotest posterity, and to consecrate the progress of our
enlightenment and diligence for ever, than Raynal's _Philosophical and
Political History of European settlements and commerce in the two
Indies_." Yet it is perhaps safe to say that not one hundred persons now
living have ever read two chapters of the book for which this immortal
future was predicted.

When the revolutionary floods gradually subsided, some of the monuments
of the previous age began to show themselves above the surface of the
falling waters. They had lost amid the stormy agitation of the deluge
the shining splendour of their first days; still men found something to
attract them after the revolution, as their grandfathers had done before
it, in the pages of the _Spirit of Laws_, of the _New Heloisa_, and the
endless satires, romances, and poems of the great Voltaire. Raynal's
book was not among these dead glories that came to li