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

century. Montesquieu, who in his early Persian Letters (1721) had revealed himself as "fundamentally irreligious" [938] and a censor of intolerance, [939] proceeded in his masterly little book on the Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734) and his famous Spirit of Laws (1748) to treat the problems of human history in an absolutely secular and scientific spirit, making only such conventional allusions to religion as were advisable in an age in which all heretical works were suppressible. [940] The attempts of La Harpe and Villemain [941] to establish the inference that he repented his youthful levity in the Persian Letters, and recognized in Christianity the main pillar of society, will not bear examination. The very passages on which they found [942] are entirely secular in tone and purpose, and tell of no belief. [943] So late as 1751 there appeared a work, Les Lettres Persanes convaincues d'impiété, by the Abbé Gaultier. The election of Montesquieu was in fact the beginning of the struggle between the Philosophe party in the Academy and their opponents; [944] and in his own day there was never much doubt about Montesquieu's deism. In his posthumous Pensées his anti-clericalism is sufficiently emphatic. "Churchmen," he writes, "are interested in keeping the people ignorant." He expresses himself as a convinced deist, and, with no great air of conviction, as a believer in immortality. But there his faith ends. "I call piety," he says, "a malady of the heart, which plants in the soul a malady of the most ineradicable kind." "The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset Nature on our behalf." "Three incredibilities among incredibilities: the pure mechanism of animals [the doctrine of Descartes]; passive obedience; and the infallibility of the Pope." [945] His heresy was of course divined by the guardians of the faith, through all his panegyric of it. Even in his lifetime, Jesuits and Jansenists combined to attack the Spirit of Laws, which was denounced at an assembly of the clergy, put on the Roman Index, and prohibited by the censure until Malesherbes came into office in 1750. [946] The Count de Cataneo, a Venetian noble in the service of the King of Prussia, published in French about 1751 a treatise on The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws, [947] in which the political rationalism and the ethical utilitarianism of Cumberland and Grotius were alike repelled as irreconcilable with the doctrine of revelation. It was doubtless because of this atmosphere of hostility that on the death of Montesquieu at Paris, in 1755, Diderot was the only man of letters who attended his funeral, [948] though the Académie performed a commemorative service. [949] Nevertheless, Montesquieu was throughout his life a figure in "good society," and suffered no molestation apart from the outcry against his books. He lived under a tradition of private freethinking and public clericalism, even as did Molière in the previous century; and where the two traditions had to clash, as at interment, the clerical dominion affirmed itself. But even in the Church there were always successors of Gassendi, to wit, philosophic unbelievers, as well as quiet friends of toleration. And it was given to an obscure Churchman to show the way of freethought to a generation of lay combatants.