that the Encyclopaedists, who
took up their philosophic succession, inevitably became a powerful
political party, and multiplied their adherents in an increasing
proportion as the years went on. From various circumstances the attack
acquired a significance and a weight in France which it had never
possessed in England. For one thing, physical science had in the
interval taken immense strides. This both dwarfed the sovereignty of
theology and theological metaphysics, and indirectly disposed men's
minds for non-theological theories of moral as well as of physical
phenomena. In France, again, the objects of the attack were inelastic
and unyielding. Political speculation in England followed, and did not
precede, political innovation and reform. In France its light played
round institutions which were too deeply rooted in absolutism and
privilege to be capable of substantial modification. Deism was
comparatively impotent against the Church of England, first, because it
was an intellectual movement, and not a social one; second, because the
constitutional doctrines of the church were flexible. Deism in the hands
of its French propagators became connected with social liberalism,
because the Catholic church in those days was identified with all the
ideas of repression. And the tendencies of deism in France grew more
violently destructive, not only because religious superstition was
grosser, but because that superstition was incorporated in a strong and
inexpansible social structure.

"It would be a mistake," wrote that sagacious and well-informed
observer, D'Argenson, so early as 1753, "to attribute the loss of
religion in France to the English philosophy, which has not gained more
than a hundred philosophers or so in Paris, instead of setting it down
to the hatred against the priests, which goes to the very last extreme.
All minds are turning to discontent and disobedience, and everything is
on the high road to a great revolution, both in religion and in
government. And it will be a very different thing to that rude
Reformation, a medley of superstition and freedom, which came to us from
Germany in the sixteenth century! As our nation and our century are
enlightened in so very different a fashion, they will go whither they
ought to go; they will banish every priest, all priesthood, all
revelation, all mystery." This, however, only represents the destructive
side of the vast change which D'Argenson then foresaw, six-and-thirty