THE eighteenth century deserves that the penman who touches its records shall have some virility; for these records contain, not only the narrative of the rapid growth of the new philosophy in France, England, and Germany, where its roots had been firmly struck in the previous century, but they also give the history of a glorious endeavor on the part of a down-trodden and long-suffering people, weakened and degraded by generations of starvation and oppression, to break the yoke of tyranny and superstition. Eighteenth century historians can write how the men of France, after having been cursed by a long race of kings, who never dreamed of identifying their interests with those of the people; after enduring centuries of tyranny from priests, whose only gods were power, pleasure, and mammon, and at the hands of nobles, who denied civil rights to their serfs; at last, could endure no longer, but electrified into life by eighteenth-century heresy, “spurned under foot the idols of tyranny and superstition,” and sought “by the influence of reason to erect on the ruins of arbitrary power the glorious edifice of civil and religious liberty.” Why Frenchmen then failed in giving permanent success to their heroic endeavor, is not difficult to explain, when we consider that every tyranny in Europe united against that young republic to which the monarchy had bequeathed a legacy of a wretched pauper people, a people whose minds had been hitherto wholly in the hands of the priests, whose passions had revolted against wrong, but whose brains were yet too weak for the permanent enjoyment of the freedom temporarily resulting from physical effort. Eighteenth-century heresy is especially noticeable for its immediate connexion with political change. For the first time in European history, the great mass commenced to yearn for the assertion in government of democratic principles. The French Republican Revolution, which overthrew Louis XVI and the Bastille, was only possible because the heretical teachers who preceded it had weakened the divine right of kingcraft; and it was ultimately unsuccessful, only because an overwhelming majority of the people were as yet not sufficiently released from the thraldom of the church, and therefore fell before the allied despotisms of Europe, who were aided by the Catholic priests, who naturally plotted against the spirit which seemed likely to make men too independent to be pious.