The suppression of the Society of Jesus may be regarded as the first great blow in the modern war of anti-Christianism. It was the annihilation of the vanguard of the army of civilization and Christianity. With the Society of Jesus out of the way, the campaign of social, moral, intellectual and religious subversion found an open road to the excesses of anarchy and revolution. The Jesuits, however, like well-disciplined soldiers of Christ, bowed to the will of the Vicar of Christ, and bore their humiliation in silence for forty years, till the day when the Pope, Pius VII., freed from the chains of persecution, called them back to honor and usefulness. _THE SOPHISTS._ The suppression of the Jesuits met with no greater joy than in the hearts of a certain class of intellectual perverts who may be regarded as the actual founders of modern anti-Christianism; these were the sophists who in that period of the eighteenth century were already flooding France and Europe with a deluge of immoral, irreligious and uncivilized literature. It is to England that we must go to find the immediate origin of this desolating spirit. There, among the Socinians and Deists, a school arose that taught men to trifle with the sublime truths of revelation and to undermine the foundations of religious belief, men like Shaftesbury, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke, who strove to subject religion to the state, and regarded virtue as a mere human instinct; who declared reason antagonistic to revelation, and saw in the Holy Scriptures nothing more than a collection of pretty fables. It was not until the eighteenth century that the influence of their theories began to ruffle the Catholic atmosphere of France. There were not wanting birds of passage who, while hibernating among the philosophic haunts of London, gathered up the seeds of infidelity to scatter them broadcast upon the soil of France. [Illustration: ROUSSEAU.] The writings of Montesquieu (1689-1775) display a sneering attitude towards the most sacred teachings and institutions of the Church. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his _Social Contract_ and similar works endeavored to destroy the social order and bring back humanity to primitive barbarism. But more terrible in the rage of his iniquity than all others, in the great war of anti-Christianism, was the arch-infidel, Francois Marie Arouet, later called Voltaire (1694-1778). Of him might have been written the lines which Milton puts into the mouth of Satan: "To do aught good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight; As being contrary to his high will, Whom we resist. If then his providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labor must be to pervert that end, And out of good still find means of evil." Par. Lost, Bk. I.