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Rh, because, forsooth, it was less a system than a challenge. It may be objected that a Reformation such as Luther had wrought for Germany in the sixteenth century, or a transformation such as Cromwell momentarily effected for this country in the seventeenth, would have been more permanently beneficial than their annihilation of all previous religious and social moulds; but the Night of St. Bartholomew had forced back the advancing tide of thought so long, that nothing could now stem its accumulated waters in their destructive overflow. It is by the sanguinary light of these massacres that we should read the writings of Voltaire and his associates; for thus only their vehement onslaughts, their motto of Écrasez l'Infâme, receive their fitting commentary.

Leader of the minds who inaugurated the revolution of thought, by importing the sensational philosophy of Hobbes and Locke into France, is the ubiquitous Voltaire—the intellectual Briareus of the eighteenth century—the man who did the thinking of fifty heads at least, and who, while assisting the Encyclopædists in their warfare against the priests, yet contrived to seat himself by the thrones of kings. Voltaire's primary service to his time consisted in his sowing division between Church and State, and in his power of making such potentates as Frederick the Great and Catharine of Russia actual accomplices of his assaults on the despotism of the Hierarchy. Thus shielded by Voltaire's supreme dexterity, his comrades could proceed in their perilous undertaking, the publication of the Encyclopédie, which, by revolutionising the thought of its generation, fitted the following one to carry thought into action.

Diderot—the son of a blacksmith, himself a smith