during the first half of the eighteenth century against the Church rather than against the State. But the State made common cause with the Church, for their interests were indissolubly linked in the maintenance of the status quo. Then arose that persecution of the literary class, of which all the most eminent French authors, from Voltaire downwards, were the victims, with the inevitable result of making them in their turn attack, not merely the Church, but Christianity itself, so difficult was it to distinguish between religion and the forms which it had assumed. About 1750, however, a great change took place. The discoveries of the early French economists had led the mind of the learned class to realize the immense importance of the doctrine of laissez faire, and the injury which a paternal Government, such as then existed in France, invariably inflicts on the objects which it most professes to cherish. At the same time the enormous activity of the authors of the Encyclopedia began to turn popular attention towards physical rather than towards mental science, and to the research of material rather than of moral truth. Atheism became the fashionable doctrine. Priestley, in his Memoirs, says that all the philosophical persons to whom he was introduced in Paris were unbelievers in Christianity, and even professed Atheists. "As I chose," he adds, "on all occasions to appear as a Christian, I was told by some of them that I was the only person they had ever met with, of whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed to believe in Christianity. But on interrogating them on the subject, I soon found that they had given no proper attention to it, and did not clearly know what Christianity was. This was also the case with a great part of the company that I saw at Lord Shelburne's."[1] The natural tendency of Atheism is to view all forms of religion with equal indifference, and thus it was that the new school of Political Economy and the new school of Natural Science, abandoning their interest in religious affairs, combined in an assault on
- ↑ Rutt's Life of Priestley, i. 199.
