France, and now began to be loudly expressed and industriously disseminated every where, were very extensively diffused over Germany together with the literature by which they had been carried to their highest maturity and perfection. They were maintained speculatively and practically by some earnest and zealous advocates, and found a very strong predisposition in their favour among the persons and classes who were most interested in opposing them, and who, having adopted and cherished and even ostentatiously displayed them as modish distinctions, afterwards, when the inconvenient consequences stared them in the face, began, with a dissimulation too gross and palpable to attain its object, publicly to discountenance and check them. In the meanwhile they exerted a powerful and pernicious influence on the great concerns of human life, morals, politics and religion. The reign of light, liberality and common sense was every where proclaimed; objects formerly deemed great, awful and holy, were brought down by ingenious accommodations to the level of ordinary capacities, and men were surprized to find how they had been abused by imposing names, when they saw what had once appeared to them too vast and mighty for the imagination to compass reduced to dimensions which they could so easily grasp. Hopes were entertained, that an enlightened system of education might destroy the germ of such mischief for the future, and that it might be possible, if not in all cases to eradicate inveterate prejudices, yet to prevent the seeds of them from lodging in the breasts of the young, by suppressing the first feelings of wonder, faith and love; and that the rising generation, trained in the principles of a calculating morality, a cosmopolitan independence and a reflecting religion, might be effectually secured from the influence of all the bugbears and charms that had ever awed or fascinated the world.