of Man had already won him a vast popularity in the teeth of the most
furious reaction, than in America. There, to his profound chagrin, he
found that his honest utterance of his heresy brought on him hatred,
calumny, ostracism, and even personal and political molestation. In
1797 he had founded in Paris the little "Church of Theo-philanthropy,"
beginning his inaugural discourse with the words: "Religion has two
principal enemies, Fanaticism and Infidelity, or that which is called
atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality;
the other by natural philosophy." [1656] These were his settled
convictions; and he lived to find himself shunned and vilified, in the
name of religion, in the country whose freedom he had so puissantly
wrought to win. [1657] The Quakers, his father's sect, refused him a
burial-place. He has had sympathy and fair play, as a rule, only from
the atheists whom he distrusted and opposed, or from thinkers who no
longer hold by deism. There is reason to think that in his last years
the deistic optimism which survived the deep disappointments of the
French Revolution began to give way before deeper reflection on the
cosmic problem, [1658] if not before the treatment he had undergone at
the hands of Unitarians and Trinitarians alike. The Butlerian argument,
that Nature is as unsatisfactory as revelation, had been pressed upon
him by Bishop Watson in a reply to the Age of Reason; and though, like
most deists of his age, he regarded it as a vain defence of orthodoxy,
he was not the man to remain long blind to its force against deistic
assumptions. Like Franklin, he had energetically absorbed and given out
the new ideals of physical science; his originality in the invention of
a tubular iron bridge, and in the application of steam to navigation,
[1659] being nearly as notable as that of Franklin's great discovery
concerning electricity. Had the two men drawn their philosophy from
the France of the latter part of the century instead of the England
of the first, they had doubtless gone deeper. As it was, temperamental
optimism had kept both satisfied with the transitional formula; and in
the France of before and after the Revolution they lived pre-occupied
with politics.