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Thus darkened was the Sun of heaven. This unreasonableness of doctrine and lack of Christian charity, wars and massacres under the flag of Christian faith, with the profligate luxury of church officials in contrast with the desperate poverty of the people, easily bred contempt for religion at a time when by the art of printing great strides had been made in popular education. What wonder that atheism and deism were having their own way! Religion and morality in the eighteenth century were fast disappearing. The judgment of the Christian Church in the view of its sanest adherents was near at hand.

John Albert Bengel [d. 1752] said, "The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is already gone; that of ​Christ is on the wane; and that of the creation hangs but by a slender thread. . . . It is made a part of politics so to act and speak as to leave no trace of religion, God, and Christ."^[3]

Dr. Dörner says, "The edifice of Lutheran Christology had been for the most part already forsaken by its inhabitants before 1750. . . . A deistical atmosphere seemed to have settled upon this generation, and to have cut it off from vital communion with God."^[4]

Leibnitz in the earlier part of the century had said, "The state to which we are approaching is one of the signs by which will be recognized that final war announced by Jesus Christ: Nevertheless, when the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?"^[5]

Abbey and Overton say, "It was about the middle of the century when irreligion and immorality reached their climax."^[6]

In 1753 Sir John Barnard said, "At present it really seems to be the fashion for a man to ​declare himself of no religion." And Archbishop Lecker declared that immorality and irreligion were grown almost beyond ecclesiastical power.^[7]

In France it was if possible worse, and Carlyle well says, "A century so opulent in accumulated falsities . . . opulent in that bad way as never century before was! Which had no longer the consciousness of being false, so false had it grown; and was so steeped in falsity, and impregnated with it to the very bone, that—in fact the measure of the thing was full, and a French Revolution had to end it."^[8]