His Social Contract in which these theories were
set forth was burned at Geneva. Though his principles will not stand
criticism for a moment, and though his doctrine worked mischief by its
extraordinary power of turning men into fanatics, yet it contributed to
progress, by helping to discredit privilege and to establish the view
that the object of a State is to secure the wellbeing of all its
members.
Deism--whether in the semi-Christian form of Rousseau or the anti-
Christian form of Voltaire--was a house built on the sand, and thinkers
arose in France, England, and Germany to shatter its foundations. In
France, it proved to be only a half-way inn to atheism. In 1770, French
readers were startled by the appearance of Baron D'Holbach's System of
Nature, in which God's existence and the immortality of the soul were
denied and the world declared to be matter spontaneously moving.
Holbach was a friend of Diderot, who had also come to reject deism. All
the leading
[159] ideas in the revolt against the Church had a place in Diderot's
great work, the Encyclopedia, in which a number of leading thinkers
collaborated with him. It was not merely a scientific book of reference.
It was representative of the whole movement of the enemies of faith. It
was intended to lead men from Christianity with its original sin to a
new conception of the world as a place which can be made agreeable and
in which the actual evils are due not to radical faults of human nature
but to perverse institutions and perverse education.
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