ighter
era for faith and the Church which was still to come in the good time of
Divine Providence. The philosophy of the last century, he says on more
than one occasion, will form one of the most shameful epochs of the
human mind: it never praised even good men except for what was bad in
them. He looked upon the gods whom that century had worshipped as the
direct authors of the bloodshed and ruin in which their epoch had
closed. The memory of mild and humane philosophers was covered with the
kind of black execration that prophets of old had hurled at Baal or
Moloch; Locke and Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, were habitually spoken of
as very scourges of God. From this temper two consequences naturally
flowed. In the first place, while it lasted there was no hope of an
honest philosophic discussion of the great questions which divide
speculative minds. Moderation and impartiality were virtues of almost
superhuman difficulty for controversialists who had made up their minds
that it was their opponents who had erected the guillotine, confiscated
the sacred property of the church, slaughtered and banished her
children, and filled the land with terror and confusion. It is hard amid
the smoking ruins of the homestead to do full justice to the theoretical
arguments of the supposed authors of the conflagration. Hence De
Maistre, though, as has been already said, intimately acquainted with
the works of his foes in the letter, was prevented by the vehemence of
his antipathy to the effects which he attributed to them, from having
any just critical estimate of their value and true spirit. 'I do not
know one of these men,' he says of the philosophers of the eighteenth
century, 'to whom the sacred title of honest man is quite suitable.'
They are all wanting in probity. Their very names '_me dechirent la
bouche_.' To admire Voltaire is the sign of a corrupt soul; and if
anybody is drawn to the works of Voltaire, then be sure that God does
not love such an one. The divine anathema is written on the very face of
this arch-blasphemer; on his shameless brow, in the two extinct craters
still sparkling with sensuality and hate, in that frightful _rictus_
running from ear to ear, in those lips tightened by cruel malice, like a
spring ready to fly back and launch forth blasphemy and sarcasm; he
plunges into the mud, rolls in it, drinks of it; he surrenders his
imagination to the enthusiasm of hell, which lends him all its forces;
Paris crowned him