From Descartes, then, as regards philosophy, more than from any professed thinker of his day, but also from the other thinkers we have noted, from the reactions of scientific discovery, from the terrible experience of the potency of religion as a breeder of strife and its impotence as a curber of evil, and from the practical freethinking of the more open-minded of that age in general, derives the great rationalistic movement, which, taking clear literary form first in the seventeenth century, has with some fluctuations broadened and deepened down to our own day. CHAPTER XIV BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY § 1 The propagandist literature of deism begins with an English diplomatist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the friend of Bacon, who stood in the full stream of the current freethought of England and France [309] in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. English deism, as literature, is thus at its very outset affiliated with French; all of its elements, critical and ethical, are germinal in Bodin, Montaigne, and Charron, each and all of whom had a direct influence on English thought; and we shall find later French thought, as in the cases of Gassendi, Bayle, Simon, St. Evremond, and Voltaire, alternately influenced by and reacting on English. But, apart from the undeveloped rationalism of the Elizabethan period, which never found literary expression, the French ferment seems to have given the first effective impulse; though it is to be remembered that about the same time the wars of religion in Germany, following on an age of theological uproar, had developed a common temper of indifferentism which would react on the thinking of men of affairs in France. We have seen the state of upper-class and middle-class opinion in France about 1624. It was in Paris in that year that Herbert published his De Veritate, after acting for five years as the English ambassador at the French court--an office from which he was recalled in the same year. [310] By his own account the book had been "begun by me in England, and formed there in all its principal parts," [311] but finished at Paris. He had, however, gone to France in 1608, and had served in various continental wars in the years following; and it was presumably in these years, not in his youth in England, that he had formed the remarkable opinions set forth in his epoch-making book.