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

after the French Revolution, reveals directly or indirectly the transmutation that the eighteenth century had worked in religious thought. Either it reacts against or it develops the rationalistic movement. In France the literary reaction is one of the first factors in the orthodox revival. Its leader and type was Chateaubriand, in whose typical work, the Génie du Christianisme (1802), lies the proof that, whatever might be the "shallowness" of Voltairism, it was profundity beside the philosophy of the majority who repelled it. On one who now reads it with the slightest scientific preparation, the book makes an impression in parts of something like fatuity. The handling of the scientific question at the threshold of the inquiry is that of a man incapable of a scientific idea. All the accumulating evidence of geology and palæontology is disposed of by the grotesque theorem that God made the world out of nothing with all the marks of antiquity upon it--the oaks at the start bearing "last year's nests"--on the ground that, "if the world were not at once young and old, the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature, for these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things." [1830] In the same fashion the fable of the serpent is with perfect gravity homologated as a literal truth, on the strength of an anecdote about the charming of a rattlesnake with music. [1831] It is humiliating, but instructive, to realize that only a century ago a "Christian reaction," in a civilized country, was inspired by such an order of ideas; and that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in view, it was the fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark Ages. [1832] The book is merely the eloquent expression of a nervous recoil from everything savouring of cool reason and clear thought, a recoil partly initiated by the sheer stress of excitement of the near past; partly fostered by the vague belief that freethinking in religion had caused the Revolution; partly enhanced by the tendency of every warlike period to develop emotional rather than reflective life. What was really masterly in Chateaubriand was the style; and sentimental pietism had now the prestige of fine writing, so long the specialty of the other side. Yet a generation of monarchism served to wear out the ill-based credit of the literary reaction; and belles lettres began to be rationalistic as soon as politics began again to be radical. Thus the prestige of the neo-Christian school was already spent before the revolution of 1848; [1833] and the inordinate vanity of Chateaubriand, who died in that year, had undone his special influence still earlier. He had created merely a literary mode and sentiment.