We are now touching what, before Hume, was the central defect of the eighteenth-century attack, judged philosophically rather than practically. The movement was a reaction against a certain set of ideas which had been incorporated in the Christian system, as that system was elaborated by the oriental sophisters. Yet the exact conflict between the old ideas and the new was never conceived, much less was it expressed, in clear comprehensive formulas. Consequently the most general terms for the debate were neither sought nor found, and hence the oppressive narrowness, the stifling want of free air, throughout the controversy. The truth or falsehood which it is good for us to discover in connection with a religion resides not in detail, but in the largest general ideas of the subject. These draw all else along with them. Let us take an illustration from a characteristic of the anti-christian attack which has already been mentioned. The Voltairean school, as we have before observed,[216] habitually derided the sacred importance attached by the church in all ages, from Saint Paul downwards, to the practice of continence. But there is no sign, so far as the present writer’s knowledge goes, that they ever were near perceiving the origin of that superstition lying deep down for so many centuries in the human mind. The sanctity of continence was only one product of the old far-spreading conviction of all the evil and unholiness essentially inherent in matter. This conviction, which has itself a history and genesis well worth tracing, probably accounts for more of the peculiar manifestations contained in Christianity than any one principle of belief besides. From this metaphysical idea sprang the whole theory of asceticism; it had much to do indirectly with the first establishment of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ; it entered into the triumph of indispensable grace.[217] The speculative origin of practices and sentiments which the heads of the western church valued, modified, and sagaciously used for ecclesiastical or political reasons, ought never to be lost sight of, because their duration has depended on the circumstance of the original speculative idea remaining deeply sunk, though not often put into articulate form, in the minds of the faithful, and of all others whom these practices and sentiments have influenced. One key to the central movement of the eighteenth century is the dispersion of this association of evil and corruption from matter. There was energetic and triumphant progress in the discovery of the laws of matter, in their most stupendous, overwhelming, and majestic order. There was a steady tendency to resolve mental manifestations into functions of matter. There was a general inclination to forget those depressing facts connected with the decay and dissolution of matter, which, in the dismal times when the church was founded, had been thrust into a prominence so humiliating to human dignity. The general movement