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Neither wealth nor power, neither education nor environment, not even the inherent tendencies of race the most powerful of all can avail against the degenerative force of a life without religion, or, what is worse, that maintains only a desiccated formula; and the post-Renaissance philosophies are one and all definitely anti-religious and self-proclaimed substitutes for religion.
I demand that there shall be an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention. There was an end of the masquerading, but the Hébertists still kept their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equally impotent against them for some months longer.
Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, and Monseigneur Laurence, Bishop of Tarbes, like the rest of the clergy, refrained from all intervention, waiting the course of events with the greatest prudence; whilst the civil authorities, the Prefect, the Public Prosecutor, the Mayor, and the Commissary of Police, indulged in excessive anti-religious zeal."
It was evident, then, that the anti-religious furor had burnt itself out, and that France was turning back to her old faith.
If he tells the clergy that the moment Home Rule is granted an anti-religious party will rise up and drive them out of the country, he will set them against Home Rule, and if the clergy are not in favour of Home Rule who, I would ask Mr. Carmady, who will be in favour of it? And I will ask you, my dear child, to ask him I suggest that you should ask him to what quarter he looks for support."
It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest.
Voltaire's incessant activity bore many fruits which survived him; he contributed powerfully to the triumph of those notions of humanity, justice, and freedom, which, superior to his own ideal, did honor to the eighteenth century; he became the model of a style, clear, neat, brilliant, the natural exponent of his own mind, far more than of the as yet confused hopes and aspirations of his age; he defended the rights of common sense, and sometimes withstood the anti-religious passion of his friends, but he blasted both minds and souls with his sceptical gibes; his bitter and at the same time temperate banter disturbed consciences which would have been revolted by the materialistic doctrines of the Encyclopaedists; the circle of infidelity widened under his hands; his disciples were able to go beyond him on the fatal path he had opened to them.
Nicolay and Hay, in their Lincoln biography, even go so far as to attack them on the ground of their religious, or rather anti-religious, beliefs, calling them "materialist Missourians," "Missouri agnostics," etc., etc. Now, after having lived among the Missouri Germans at the time of our civil troubles, the writer is impelled to say a few words in their behalf.
In this way it has come to pass that at the very moment in which a reaction against the irreligious or anti-religious philosophy of a couple of generations ago is making itself felt in the study, the spreading pestilence of negation and unbelief has gained and continues to gain possession of the street.
Even K. E. von Baer, who expressly contests the idea of selection, thinks it only scientifically indefensible, but not anti-religious; an opinion also held by Wigand.
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