ment which he foresaw with so much alarm. He admits
the state of nature, and thinks civil society not the
primitive condition of man, but a result of the passage
from savage life to husbandry. He would transfer the
duties of government to local and central assemblies; and
he demands entire freedom of trade, and education provided
by law, because children belong to the State first and to
the family afterwards. He does not resign the hope of
making men good by act of parliament, and his belief in
public institutions as a means of moulding individual
character brings him nearly into touch with a distant
future.
He is the Platonic founder of revolutionary thinking. Whilst his real views were little known, he became a popular memory; but some complained that his force was centrifugal, and that a church can no more be preserved by suavity and distinction than a state by liberty and justice. Lewis XVI., we are often told, perished in expiation of the sins of his forefathers. He perished, not because the power he inherited from them had been carried to excess, but because it had been discredited and undermined. One author of this discredit was Fe"nelon. Until he came, the ablest men, Bossuet and even Bayle, revered the monarchy. Fe"nelon struck it at the zenith, and treated Lewis XIV. in all his grandeur more severely than the disciples of Voltaire treated Lewis XV. in all his degradation. The season of scorn and shame begins with him. The best of his later contemporaries followed his example, and laid the basis of opposing criticism on motives of religion. They were the men whom Cardinal Dubois describes as dreamers of the same dreams as the chimerical archbishop of Cambray. Their influence fades away before the great change that came over France about the middle of the century.
From that time unbelief so far prevailed that even men who were not professed assailants, as Montesquieu, Condillac, Turgot, were estranged from Christianity. Politically, the consequence was this: men who did not attribute any deep significance to church questions never
