A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

to the gathering tide of unbelief. The Benedictine Lami followed up his attack on Spinoza with a more popular treatise, L'Incrédule amené à la religion par la raison (1710); the Abbé Genest turned Descartes into verse by way of Preuves naturelles de l'existence de Dieu et de l'immortalité de l'âme (1716); and the Anti-Lucretius of Cardinal Polignac (1661-1741), though only posthumously published in full (1745), did but pass on to the next age, when deism was the prevailing heresy, a deistic argument against atheism. It is difficult to see any Christian sentiment in that dialectic performance of a born diplomatist. [930] When the old king died, even the fashion of conformity passed away among the upper classes; [931] and the feverish manufacture of apologetic works testifies to an unslackened activity of unbelief. In 1719 Jean Denyse, professor of philosophy at the college of Montaigu, produced La vérité de la religion chrétienne demontrée par ordre géométrique (a title apparently suggested by Spinoza's early exposition of Descartes), without making any permanent impression on heterodox opinion. Not more successful, apparently, was the performance of the Abbé Houteville, first published in 1722. [932] Much more amiable in tone, and more scientific in temper, than the common run of defences, it was found, says an orthodox biographical dictionary, to be "better fitted to make unbelievers than to convert them," seeing that "objections were presented with much force and fulness, and the replies with more amenity than weight." [933] That the Abbé was in fact not rigorously orthodox might almost be suspected from his having been appointed, in the last year of his life (1742), "perpetual secretary" to the Académie, an office which somehow tended to fall to more or less freethinking members, being held before him by the Abbé Dubos, and after him by Mirabaud, the Abbé Duclos, [934] D'Alembert, and Marmontel. The Traités des Premières Veritéz of the Jesuit Father Buffier (1724) can hardly have been more helpful to the faith. [935] Another experiment by way of popularizing orthodoxy, the copious Histoire du peuple de Dieu, by the Jesuit Berruyer, first published in 1728, [936] had little better fortune, inasmuch as it scandalized the orthodox by its secularity of tone without persuading the freethinkers. Condemned by the Bishop of Montpellier in 1731, it was censured by Rome in 1734; and the second part, produced long afterwards, aroused even more antagonism.