Nevertheless, this could suffice only to a certain extent. It might serve to emancipate the intelligent classes, but could not emancipate the people. The latter half of the eighteenth century—a century of anti-Christian light, philosophy, physical science, and materialism—was more distinguished for the mysterious phenomena, usually called demoniacal, than any other period since the Christianizing of the Roman Empire, with the single exception of the sixteenth century. Weishaupt, Mesmer, Saint-Martin, and Cagliostro, did far more to produce the revolutions and convulsions of European society at the close of that century, than was done by Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, Diderot, Mirabeau, and their associates. These men had no doubt a bad influence, but it was limited and feeble. It was not they who stirred up all classes, produced that revolutionary madness, that wild ungovernable fury of the people which we everywhere witnessed, and nowhere more than in Paris, the politest and most humane city in the world. The masses were possessed, they were whirled aloft, were driven hither and thither, and onward in the terrible work of demolition, by a mysterious power they did not comprehend, and by a force they were unable, having once yielded to it, to resist. You feel this in reading the history of those terrible events. It seems to you that Satan was unbound, and hell let loose. The historians of that old French Revolution, such as Mignet, Thiers, Lamartine, Carlyle, all feel that there was something _fatal_ in it, and have been led, at least all except the last, to defend it on the ground of fatalism. The Royalist and Catholic historians, who oppose it, seem never to seize its spirit. They declaim, denounce, find fault here, find fault there, now with this action and now with that, but they never explain any thing, solve any problem which comes up, and they leave the whole a mystery, or an enigma.