Such was the intellectual state of France in reference to the standard of appeal contemporaneously with the political and ecclesiastical condition before described. In the state and church all was authority; all was of the past; in the world of literature and philosophy all was criticism, activity, hope in the future. Into a soil thus prepared the seeds of unbelief on the subject of religion were introduced. We cannot deny that they were imported mainly from England. Doubt had indeed not been wholly wanting in France. In the preceding centuries Montaigne(507) and Charron,(508) and, at the commencement of the one of which we speak, Bayle(509) and Fontenelle,(510) were probably harassed with disbelief, and their influence was certainly productive of doubt. And free thought, in the form of literary criticism of the scriptures, had brought down the denunciation of the French church on Richard Simon.(511) But undoubtedly the direct parent of the French unbelief was English deism.(512) In no age of French history has English literature possessed so powerful an influence.(513) England had recently achieved those liberties of which France felt the need. It had safely outlived civil war and revolution, and had established constitutional liberty and religious toleration. In England the victims of the French oppression found shelter. Being itself free, it became the refuge for the exile, the shelter for the oppressed. It thus became the object of study to the politician, and of love to the philanthropist. Its literature too, in two branches, viz. political inquiry, and, towards the middle of the century, romance, offered subjects for imitation. Montesquieu studied the former; Rousseau and Diderot the latter. But England furnished also a series of fearless inquirers on the subject of religion, whose works became the subject of study and of translation.(514) Voltaire spent three years of exile in England,(515) at the time when the ferment existed concerning Woolston’s attack on miracles, and both knew Bolingbroke personally, and translated his writings. Having now explained the sources of doubt in France; we must next direct our attention to the course of its speculations, and to the chief authors.