Close in line with the irreligion of Voltaire was the work of Denis Diderot, the founder of the infamous _Encyclopaedia_, a huge mass of calumny against the religion of Christ, abounding in falsification of history, in doctrines inviting to immorality of life and subversion of all lawfully constituted authority. The poison of the _Encyclopaedia_ was quickly assimilated by the aristocratic element of Paris. At first the salons, those rendezvous of the higher classes, took up the work, and by their discussions gave it a tone. It was highly acceptable to a social order, at that time immoral and impious to a degree; but its venom gradually overflowed to the masses, ever eager to imitate the excesses of the great. The efforts of the leaders of irreligion were ably seconded by the various systems that arose towards the close of the eighteenth century, as so many developments of Deism and the worship of nature. The Sensationalists, under the tutelage of La Metrie, Condillac, Helvetius, and Holback, would make of man a mere machine, more ingeniously organized than the brutes; thought was reduced to a mere physical operation of the human body; hence the negation of the spiritual world, the spiritual soul, and the hope of immortality. The Rationalists in Germany led to disbelief in the inspiration and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. Pantheism, Agnosticism, Idealism, and a thousand and one like branches of error, sprang forth from the revolt of the earlier sophists, all contributing their part to inflame and destroy the souls of men, and leading them on by sure steps to final anarchy. The very multiplicity of such sophistic theories, arising amidst the darkness of anti-Christian night, like the constantly changing figures in a kaleidoscope, were but the ghosts of a hideous phantasmagoria, that, scarcely seen, resolved themselves into something more strange and more appalling. It was the gathering of the spirits of iniquity for the grand assault upon the City of God. _FREEMASONRY._