1. "The five writers to whose genius we owe the first attempt at comprehensive views of history were Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. Of these the second was but a cold believer in Christianity, if, indeed, he believed in it at all; and the other four were avowed and notorious infidels."—Buckle.

2 "Here, then, we have the starting-point of progress—scepticism.... All, therefore, that men want is no hindrance from their political and religious rulers.... Until common minds doubt respecting religion they can never receive any new scientific conclusion at variance with it—as Joshua and Copernicus."—Ibid.

3. "The immortal work of Gibbon, of which the sagacity is, if possible, equal to the learning, did find readers, but the illustrious author was so cruelly reviled by men who called themselves Christians, that it seemed doubtful if, after such an example, subsequent writers would hazard their comfort and happiness by attempting to write philosophic history. Middleton wrote in 1750.... As long as the theological spirit was alive nothing could be effected."—Ibid.

4. "The questions which presented themselves to the acuter minds of a hundred years ago were present to the acuter minds who lived hundreds of years before that.... But the Church had known how to deal with intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the twelfth century down to Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were isolated, and for the most part submissive; and if they were not, the arm of the Church was very long and her grasp mortal.... They [the thinkers] could have taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn, that the sun does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun.... After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was marked in one of its most important phases by a new, and most significant, feature.... It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral motive.... The philosophical movement was represented by "Diderot" [leading the Encyclopaedist circle.]... Broadly stated the great central moral of it was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation.... Into what fresh and unwelcome sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology... Every social improvement since has been the outcome of that new doctrine in one form or another.... The teaching of the Church paints men as fallen and depraved. The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the new fabric rising was very natural.... The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points, alike in letter and spirit, with the old sacred lore.... A hundred years ago this perception was vague and indefinite, but there was an unmistakable apprehension that the Catholic ideal of womanhood was no more adequate to the facts of life, than Catholic views about science, or popery, or labor, or political order and authority."—Morley.

And it took the rising infidels to discover the fact. See Morley, "Diderot," p. 76.

"The greatest fact in the intellectual history of the eighteenth century is the decisive revolution that overtook the sustaining conviction of the Church. The central conception, that the universe was called into existence only to further its Creator's purpose toward man, became incredible (by the light of the new thought). What seems to careless observers a mere metaphysical dispute was in truth, and still is, the decisive quarter of the great battle between theology and a philosophy reconcilable with science."—Morley.

"The man who ventured to use his mind [Diderot] was thrown into the dungeon at Vincennes."—Ibid.

5. "Those thinkers [Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot] taught men to reason; reasoning well leads to acting well; justness in the mind becomes justice in the heart. Those toilers for progress labored usefully.... The French Revolution was their soul. It was their radiant manifestation. It came from them; we find them everywhere in that blest and superb catastrophe, which formed the conclusion of the past and the opening of the future.... The new society, the desire for equality and concession, and that beginning of fraternity which called itself tolerance, reciprocal good-will, the just accord of men and rights, reason recognized as the supreme law, the annihilation of prejudices and fixed opinions, the serenity of souls, the spirit of indulgence and of pardon, harmony, peace—behold what has come from them!"—Victor Hugo, "Oration on Voltaire."