itutions which now
depress us, would choke nature in him, and nothing would be put in its
stead. He would resemble a young tree which, growing up accidentally in
the street, would soon pine away in consequence of the passers-by
pushing it from all sides, and bending it in all directions." Rousseau
wrote with great earnestness, and possessed the faculty of inspiring his
readers with an enthusiastic admiration of his theories. His romances
misled many thousands, and were the most popular productions of his
times. Though he and Voltaire were the exponents of French Deism, they
were greatly aided in the dissemination of skeptical doctrines by
Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvetius, d'Argent, de la Mettrie, and others.
Bayle, in his Dictionary, appealed to the learned circles; and, not
content to give only historical facts, he ventured upon the origination
or reproduction of those new skeptical opinions which captivated
unthinking multitudes.

The Deism of France was now a coadjutor with that of England in the
devastation of Germany. The throne of Frederic II. was the exponent and
defender of the hollow creed. The military successes of that king gave
him an authority that few monarchs have been able to wield, while his
well-known literary taste and capacity enlisted the admiration of men of
culture throughout the Continent. Born to bear the sword, he surprised
his subjects by the same felicity in the use of the pen; and the man
who could leave to his successors a treasury with a surplus of
seventy-two millions of thalers, an army of two hundred and twenty
thousand men, a kingdom increased by twenty-nine thousand square miles,
and a people grown since his accession from two millions to thrice that
number, was not a king who could be without great moral weight among his
own subjects. And it was known that he was a skeptic, for he made no
secret of it. No traces of the old Pietism of his harsh father were
visible in the son. Gathering around him such men as Voltaire, La
Mettrie, Maupertuis, and others whom his gold could attach to him, he
was the same king in faith and literature that he was in politics.
Claiming to be a Deist, it is probable that he was a very liberal one.
It is more than likely that he was truthful in his description of
himself when he wrote to d'Alembert that he had never lived under the
same roof with religion. He claimed for his meanest subjects the right
to serve God in their own way; but all the power of his exa