Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and
political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_,
who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as
they did to _L'Infâme_, were credited with the responsibility for all
the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much
justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants'
revolt, or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our
_ancien régime_ was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was
never in such a bad way as in France; it was still capable of being
repaired; and our forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until
that operation could be safely performed, rather than pull it all down
about their ears, in order to build a philosophically planned house on
brand-new speculative foundations. Under these circumstances, it is
not wonderful that, in this country, practical men preferred the
gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while enough
of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and
support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical
supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the
indifference, prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth
century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which
submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even seemed, for a time,
to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which that work was an
imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier,
free-thought merely took to running underground, safe, sooner or
later, to return to the surface.

* * * * *

My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and