INFIDELS.

"BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM."

HORNE, in his introduction to the Scriptures, after giving a review of the leading infidels up to his own time, gives a brief account of the lives of those who attempted to destroy the Christian religion. He shows us that the lives of these champions of infidelity were of a most scandalous nature. We intend in the following article to call the attention of our readers to this subject, and show what we may always expect to see from those who adopt infidel opinions. If the leaders and teachers of infidelity are such disgusting creatures, what can we expect from their followers ? Infidels we know can point the finger of scorn at many a Christian professor, but he cannot put his finger on a single word in the bible which countenances vice, or encourages evil. The infidel teaches and practises evil. Christianity teaches purity, and holds in scorn all her followers who lead impure lives.
"While Hume and Bolingbroke," says Horne, "were propagating these sentiments in England, Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, Frederick II. King of Prussia, and other distinguished writers, had confederated for the avowed purpose of annihilating the Christian religion. The printed works of the three first-named writers exhibit a total disregard of truth and honour, together with such a compound of falsehood, envy, malignity, hatred, contempt of one another, and of all the world, as cannot but convey a horrible impression of the spirit and tendency of infidelity."
Let us now take a brief view of the precepts of infidels concerning morals.

Lord Herbert says that the indulgence of lust and of anger is no more to be blamed than the thirst occasioned by dropsy ! Hobbes says that every man has a right to all things, and may lawfully get them if he can !

Lord Bolingbroke taught that ambition, the lust of power, sensuality, and avarice, may be lawfully gratified if they can be safely gratified, that modesty is vanity, that the chief end of man is sensual gratification, that polygamy is a part of the law or religion of nature, that adultery is no violation of the law of nature!

Hume taught that adultery must be practised if men would obtain all the advantages of life; that, if generally practised, it would in time cease to be scandalous, and that if practised secretly and frequently, it would by degrees come to be thought no crime at all! ! !

Gibbon, the polished and more decent infidel, shows by his own biography that he was a man that had the most heartless and sordid selfishness, vain glory, a desire of admiration, adulation of the great and wealthy, contempt of the poor, and supreme devotedness to his own gratifications.

Voltaire and Helvetius both advocated the unlimited gratification of the sensual appetites. That unlawful intercourse with married women was not a vice.

Rousseau was a thief, a liar, and a debauched profligate, according to his own confessions.

Lord Herbert, Hobbes, Lord Shaftesbury, Woolston, Tindal, Chubb, and Lord 
Bolingbroke, were all guilty of the vile hypocrisy of lying.

Collins, to qualify himself for a civil office, was so vile as to take the Lord's Supper.

Voltaire was a shameless adulterer, who, with his abandoned mistress, violated the confidence of his visitors by opening their letters, and his total want of principle, moral or religious, his impudent audacity, his filthy sensuality, his persecuting envy, his treachery, tyranny, cruelty, his profligacy, and his hypocrisy, will render him for ever the scorn of mankind.

Paine was a notorious drunkard.  

The lives of all these infidel teachers present nothing more or less than a reeking stye of licentiousness, infamy, and vice. But we may ask what effect would be produced upon the world at large if the teaching of these degraded creatures were adopted ? Horne shows us what was the effect produced when a whole nation did adopt infidel views. " The great majority of the French nation had become infidels. The name and profession of Christianity was renounced by the legislature, and the abolition of the Christian era was proclaimed.
Death was declared, by an act of the republican government, to be an eternal sleep. The existence of the Deity, and the immortality of the soul, were formally disavowed by the National Convention; and the doctrine of the resurrection from the dead was declared to have been only preached by superstition for the torment of the living. All the religions in the world were proclaimed to be the daughters of ignorance and pride, and it was decreed to be the duty of the convention to assume the honourable office of disseminating atheism—which was blasphemously affirmed to be the truth—over all the world. As a part of this duty, the convention further decreed, that its express renunciation of all religious worship should, like its invitations to rebellion, be translated into all foreign languages; and it was asserted and received in the convention that the adversaries of religion had deserved well of their country ! Correspondent with these professions and declarations were the effects actually produced. Public worship was utterly abolished. The churches were converted into "temples of reason," in which atheistical and licentious homilies were substituted for the proscribed service; and an absurd, ludicrous imitation of the pagan mythology was exhibited under the title of the religion of reason." In the principal church of every town a tutelary goddess was installed with a ceremony equally pedantic, frivolous, and profane; and the females selected to personify this new divinity, were mostly prostitutes, who received the adorations of the attendant municipal officers, and of the multitudes whom fear, or force, or motives of gain, had collected together on the occasion. Contempt for religion or decency became the test of attachment to the government, and the gross infraction of any moral or social duty, was deemed a proof of civism, and a victory over prejudice. All distinctions of right and wrong were confounded. The grossest debauchery triumphed. The reign of atheism and reason was a reign of terror. "Then proscription followed upon proscription, tragedy followed after tragedy, in almost breathless succession, on the theatre of France. Almost the whole nation was converted into a horde of assassins. Democracy and atheism hand in hand, desolated the country and converted it into one vast field of rapine and of blood." In one part of France, the course of a river, the "Loire," was impeded by the drowned bodies of the ministers of religion, several hundred of whom were destroyed in its waters; children were sentenced to death for the faith and loyalty of their parents, and they whose in fancy had sheltered them from the fire of the soldiery were bayonetted as they clung about the knees of their destroyers. The moral and social ties were unloosed, or rather torn asunder. For a man to accuse his own father was declared to be an act of civism worthy of a true republican, and to neglect it, was pronounced a crime that should be punished with death. Accordingly, women denounced their husbands, and mothers their sons, as bad citizens and traitors, while many women—not of the dress of the common people, nor of infamous reputation, but respectable in character and appearance— seized with savage ferocity between their teeth the mangled limbs of their murdered countrymen. "France, during this period, was a theatre of crimes, which, after all preceding perpetrations, have excited in the mind of every spectator amazement and horror.
The miseries suffered by that single nation have changed all the histories of the preceding sufferings of mankind into idle tales, and have been enhanced and multiplied without a precedent, without a number, and without a name. The kingdom appeared to be changed into one great prison, the inhabitants converted into felons, and the common doom of man commuted for the violence of the sword and bayonet, the sucking boat, and the guillotine. To contemplative men it seemed for a season as if the knell of the whole nation was tolled, and the world summoned to its execution and its funeral." Within the short period of ten years, not less than three millions of human beings are supposed to have perished in that single country by the influence of atheism. Were the world to adopt, and be governed by the doctrines of revolutionary France, what crimes would not mankind perpetrate ? What agonies would they not suffer ?


 Mercury and Weekly Courier 13 November 1885,