considerably modified by foreign influences. In
Gibbon, about 1776, the ancient spirit of deism, the spirit of
Bolingbroke, speaks, but the form is changed. Instead of denying
Christianity on _a priori_ moral considerations, he feels bound to explain
facts. The attack is not so much moral as historic. The inquiry into
historical _origines_ as well as logical causes has commenced. The mode of
attack too has changed, as well as the point from which it is made. The
French influence is visible in the satire and irony prevalent. There is no
longer the bitter moral indignation of the early English deists, but the
sneer that marks the spirit of contempt. Fear and hatred of Christianity
have given way to philosophical contempt. (25)

In Thomas Paine, who wrote in France in the midst of the meeting of the
French Convention, we meet a nearer reproduction of the spirit of early
English deism, but he has even more than Gibbon caught the spirit of the
French movement. Gibbon's scepticism is that of high life; Paine's of low.
The one writer sneers, the other hates. The one is a philosopher, the
other a politician. Paine represents the infidel movement of England when
it had spread itself among the lower orders, and mingled itself with the
political dissatisfaction for which unhappily there was supposed to be
some ground. Paine's spirit is that of English deism animated by the
political exasperation which had characterised the French. His doctrines
come from English deism; his bitterness from Voltaire; his politics from
Rousseau.

Within the limits of the present century two other traces are found of the
influence of the French school of infidelity, which therefore ought
logically to be comprised with it. The one is political, the other
literary; viz. the socialist schemes of Owen, which in some respects seem
to be derived by direct lineage from Paine, and the expression of unbelief
in the poetry of Byron and Shelley.

We must briefly notice these writers in succession. The first in the
series is Gibbon.(621) Though he has left an autobiography, he has not
fully unveiled the causes which shook his faith, and made him turn deist.
We can however collect that the reaction from the doubts suggested by the
perusal of Middleton's work on the subject of the cessation of miracles,
then recently brought into notoriety, (26) turned him to the church of
Rome; and that his residence abroad and familiarity with French literature
caused him to d