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. To divert interest
from the dogmas of religion to the improvement of society, to persuade
the world that man’s felicity depends not on Revelation but on social
transformation—this was what Diderot and Rousseau in their different
ways did so much to effect. And their work influenced those who did not
abandon orthodoxy; it affected the spirit of the Church itself. Contrast
the Catholic Church in France in the eighteenth and in the nineteenth
century. Without the work of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and their
fellow-combatants, would it have been reformed? “The Christian Churches”
(I quote Lord Morley) “are assimilating as rapidly as their formulae
will permit, the new light and the more generous moral ideas and the
higher spirituality of

[160] teachers who have abandoned all churches and who are
systematically denounced as enemies of the souls of men.”

In England the prevalent deistic thought did not lead to the same
intellectual consequences as in France; yet Hume, the greatest English
philosopher of the century, showed that the arguments commonly adduced
for a personal God were untenable. I may first speak of his discussion