A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
No list of orthodox names remotely comparable with these can be drawn
from the literature of France, or indeed of any other country of that
time. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the one other pre-eminent
figure, though not an anti-Christian propagandist, is distinctly on
the side of deism. In the Contrat Social, [1045] writing with express
approbation of Hobbes, he declares that "the Christian law is at bottom
more injurious than useful to the sound constitution of the State"; and
even the famous Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar in the Émile is
anti-revelationist, and practically anti-clerical. He was accordingly
anathematized by the Sorbonne, which found in Émile nineteen heresies;
the book was seized and burned both at Paris and at Geneva within a few
weeks of its appearance, [1046] and the author decreed to be arrested;
even the Contrat Social was seized and its vendors imprisoned. All
the while he had maintained in Émile doctrines of the usefulness of
religious delusion and fanaticism. Still, although his temperamental
way of regarding things has a clear affinity with some later religious
philosophy of a more systematic sort, he undoubtedly made for
freethought as well as for the revolutionary spirit in general. Thus
the cause of Christianity stood almost denuded of intellectually
eminent adherents in the France of 1789; for even among the writers
who had dealt with public questions without discussing religion, or
who had criticized Rousseau and the philosophes--as the Abbés Mably,
Morellet, Millot--the tone was essentially rationalistic.
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