The remainder of this lecture will be employed in tracing the history of free thought in England, from the date at which the narrative was interrupted to a little later than the end of the century; especially noticing the mode in which it was influenced by the movement in France. It will be remembered that we brought down the history of it as far as Hume.(620) We paused there, because deism then ends as a literary movement. Politics and new forms of literature absorbed the mind. Free thought continued to exist; but it was less frequently expressed in literature, and was considerably modified by foreign influences. In Gibbon, about 1776, the ancient spirit of deism, the spirit of Bolingbroke, speaks, but the form is changed. Instead of denying Christianity on _à priori_ moral considerations, he feels bound to explain facts. The attack is not so much moral as historic. The inquiry into historical _origines_ as well as logical causes has commenced. The mode of attack too has changed, as well as the point from which it is made. The French influence is visible in the satire and irony prevalent. There is no longer the bitter moral indignation of the early English deists, but the sneer that marks the spirit of contempt. Fear and hatred of Christianity have given way to philosophical contempt. (25) In Thomas Paine, who wrote in France in the midst of the meeting of the French Convention, we meet a nearer reproduction of the spirit of early English deism, but he has even more than Gibbon caught the spirit of the French movement. Gibbon’s scepticism is that of high life; Paine’s of low. The one writer sneers, the other hates. The one is a philosopher, the other a politician. Paine represents the infidel movement of England when it had spread itself among the lower orders, and mingled itself with the political dissatisfaction for which unhappily there was supposed to be some ground. Paine’s spirit is that of English deism animated by the political exasperation which had characterised the French. His doctrines come from English deism; his bitterness from Voltaire; his politics from Rousseau. Within the limits of the present century two other traces are found of the influence of the French school of infidelity, which therefore ought logically to be comprised with it. The one is political, the other literary; viz. the socialist schemes of Owen, which in some respects seem to be derived by direct lineage from Paine, and the expression of unbelief in the poetry of Byron and Shelley.