that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'[41] It has long been the fashion among the followers of that reaction which Coleridge led and Carlyle has spread and popularised, to dwell exclusively on the coldness and hardness, the excess of scepticism and the defect of enthusiasm, that are supposed to have characterised the eighteenth century. Because the official religion of the century both in England and France was lifeless and mechanical, it has been taken for granted that the level of thought and feeling was a low one universally; as if the highest moods of every era necessarily clothed themselves in religious forms. The truth is that, working in such natures as Condorcet's, the principles of the eighteenth century, its homage to reason and rational methods, its exaltation of the happiness of men, not excluding their material wellbeing, into the highest place, its passion for justice and law, its large illumination, all engendered a fervour as truly religious as that of Catholicism or of Calvinism at their best, while its sentiment was infinitely less interested and personal. The passage just quoted is as little mechanical, as little material, as the most rapturous ejaculations of the Christian saints and confessors. Read in connection with the circumstances of its composition, it may show that the eighteenth century was able at any rate to inspire its sons with a faith that could rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory, as effectually as if it had rested on a mystery instead of on reason, and been supported by the sanctions of eternal pain and eternal bliss, instead of moving from a confident devotion to humanity. FOOTNOTES: [30] _Déclaration de l'Assemblée Nationale_, 29 Déc. 1791. _Œuv._ xii. 25. [31] 13th August 1792. _Œuv._ x. 547. [32] _Ib._ x. 560. [33] 19th August. _Ib._ x. 565. [34] _Opinion sur le Jugement de Louis XVI._ Nov. 1792 _Œuv._ xii. 267-303. [35] 19th Jan. 1793. _Œuv._ xii. 311. [36] See M. Edgar Quinet's remarks on this achievement. _La Révolution_, ii. 110. [37] _Œuv._ xii. 333, 417. M. Louis Blanc has contrasted the principles laid down as the basis of this project with Robespierre's rival Declaration of the Rights of Man, printing the two side by side in parallel columns. '_Les voilà donc face à face, après leur commune victoire sur le principe d'autorité, ces deux principes d'individualisme et de fraternité, entre lesquels, aujourd'hui même, le monde balance, invinciblement ému! D'un côté la philosophie du rationalisme pur, qui divise; d'un autre côté la philosophie du sentiment, qui rapproche et réunit. Ici Voltaire et Condorcet, là J. J. Rousseau et Robespierre._' _Hist. de la Révol. Fran._ bk. ix. ch. v. [38] _Extrait du Moniteur._ _Œuv._ xii. 677.