been far better secured by the prevalence of a purer faith. There are some circumstances, of a novel and unprecedented nature, which impart a solemn interest to our present inquiry. At the beginning of the present century, Robert Hall, referring to the unbelief which preceded and accompanied the first outburst of the Revolution in France, mentioned _three_ circumstances which appeared to him to be "equally new and alarming." He regarded it as the first attempt which had ever been witnessed on an extensive scale to establish the principles of Atheism, as the first attempt to popularize these principles by means of a literature addressed and adapted to the common people, and as the first systematic attempt to undermine the foundations, and to innovate on the very substance of Morals.[24] But if we compare the first with the new Encyclopedie,--the former concocted by Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot, the latter by Pierre Leroux and his associates,--we shall find that Infidelity has assumed greater hardihood, and has appeared under less restraint in recent than in former times; while the speculations of Comte and Crousse are as thoroughly atheistic as those of D'Holbach himself. For, however irreligious and profane Voltaire and his associates might be, and however devoted to their avowed object of crushing Christ and his cause, so significantly indicated by their motto and watchword, "Ecrasez l'Infame;"[25] yet they continued, as a party, to advocate Deism, and seemed at least to oppose the bolder speculations of the author of the "Systeme de la Nature." Both Voltaire and Frederick the Great wrote in reply to its atheistic tenets.[26] But now, in France, these tenets are openly avowed and zealously propagated. Nor is this fatal moral epidemic confined to our continental neighbors: there is too much reason to fear that it has infected, to some extent, the artisans of our own manufacturing towns, and even, in some quarters, the inhabitants of our rural districts. The Communists of France have their analogues in the Socialists of Britain; and the periodical press, although for the most part sound, or at least innocuous, has lent its aid to the dissemination of the grossest infidelity which the Continent has produced. The "Leader" gives forth Lewes's version of Comte's Philosophy; and the "Glasgow Mechanics' Journal," a digest of his Law of Human Progress, which is essentially atheistic.[27] Nor is indigenous Atheism wanting. Mr. Mackay in his "Progress of the Intellect," Atkinson and Martineau in their "Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development," and Mr. G. Holyoake in "The Reasoner," have sufficiently proved that if Atheism be an exotic, it is capable of taking root and growing up in the land of Bacon, Newton, and Boyle. FOOTNOTES: [2] BUDDAEI, "Theses Theologicae de Atheismo et Superstitione," cap. I. [3] J. C. WOLFIUS, "De Atheismi falso Suspectis."