"6. The carelessness and infatuation of parents and magistrates, with respect to the education of youth, and the consequent early corruption of the rising generation."
According to Abbey and Overton,—
"It was about the middle of the century when irreligion and immorality reached their climax. In 1753 Sir John Barnard said publicly: 'At present it really seems to be the fashion for a man to declare himself of no religion.' In the same year [Archbishop] Seeker declared that immorality and irreligion were grown almost beyond ecclesiastical power. . . . If we ask what was the state of the lower classes, we find such notices as these in a contemporary historian: '1729-30.—Luxury created necessities, and these drove the lower ranks into the most abandoned wickedness. It was unsafe to travel or walk in the streets. . . . 1731.—Profligacy among the people continued to an amazing degree.' H. Walpole writes of 1751: 'The vices of the lower people were increased to a degree of robbery and murder beyond example.'"[1]
The thirty years of peace following 1714, though materially "the most prosperous season that England had ever experienced," were nevertheless, says Pattison, "one of decay of religion, licentiousness of morals, public corruption, profaneness of language,—a day of rebuke and blasphemy."[2]
If such was the condition in sober, moral England, we need not say that in France it was far worse. Not to describe the manners, let us only hear one or two of the public utterances of the time. In 1758 appeared at Paris the essay of Helvetius, De l' Esprit, of which it was said by a famous woman that it uttered only the secret of all the world. "Self-love or interest," says the author, "is the lever of all our mental activities. . . . But since all self-love refers essentially only to bodily pleasure, it follows that every mental occurrence within us has its peculiar source only in the striving after this
- ↑ Abbey and Overton: The English Church in the 18th Century, ii. 44.
- ↑ M. Pattison: Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750.
