N class of people," writes Barbier, "man or woman, pretending to
be intellectual, who is not eager to read it." People accost each other on their promenades, Have you read "Les Moeurs"?--Ten years later they are beyond deism. "Materialism," Barbier
further said, "is the great grievance.
. . . " "Almost all people of erudition and taste, writes
d'Argenson, "inveigh against our holy religion. . . . It is attacked
on all sides, and what animates unbelievers still more is the efforts made by
the devout to compel belief. They publish books which are but little read; debates no longer take place, everything being laughed at, while people persist
in materialism." Horace Walpole, who returns
to France in 1765,[4218] and whose good sense anticipates
the danger, is astonished at such imprudence: "I dined to day with a dozen scholars and scientists, and although all the servants were around us
and listening, the conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would allow at my own table in England even if a single footman
was present." People dogmatize everywhere. "Joking is as much out of fashion as jumping jacks and tumblers. Our good f olks have no time to laugh! There is God and the king to be hauled down first; and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having any belief left. . . . Do you know who the philosophers are, or what the term means here? In the first place it comprehends almost everybody; and in the
next, means men, who, avowing war against popery, take aim, many of them, at a subversion of all
religion. . . . These savants,--I beg their pardons, these philosophers--are insupportable, superficial, overbearing
and fanatic: they p
R of decaying trunks. One of them, the Parliament, an offshoot simply
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