EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
clare himself of no religion." And Archbishop Lecker declared that immorality and irreligion were grown almost beyond ecclesiastical power.[1]
In France it was if possible worse, and Carlyle well says, "A century so opulent in accumulated falsities . . . opulent in that bad way as never century before was! Which had no longer the consciousness of being false, so false had it grown; and was so steeped in falsity, and impregnated with it to the very bone, that—in fact the measure of the thing was full, and a French Revolution had to end it."[2]
"In Germany," says Schlegel, "during the atheistic and revolutionary period of the French philosophy, immediately prior to the French Revolution, as well as at its commencement, Christianity and in fact all religion was regarded as a mere prejudice of the infancy of the human mind, totally destitute of foundation in truth, and no longer adapted to the spirit of the age; monarchy and the whole civilization of modern Europe as abuses no longer to be tolerated. It was only when men had reached this extreme term of their
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