Kings were reminded of the middle ages, and of the thrones outraged by the popes.

They did not see, without umbrage and secret hate, the clergy as powerful as themselves with the people, and who under the name of cardinals, almoners, bishops or confessors, spied, or dictated its creeds even to courts themselves.
The parliaments, that civil clergy, a body redoubtable to sovereigns themselves, detested the mass of the clergy, although they protected its faith and its decrees.

The nobility, warlike, corrupted, and ignorant, leaned entirely to the unbelief which freed it from all morality.
Finally, the _bourgeoisie_, well-informed or learned, prefaced the emancipation of the third estate by the insurrection of the new condition of ideas.
Such were the elements of the revolution in religious matters.

Voltaire laid hold of them, at the precise moment, with that _coup d'oeil_ of strong instinct which sees clearer than genius itself.

To an age young, fickle, and unreflecting, he did not present reason under the form of an austere philosophy, but beneath the guise of a facile freedom of ideas and a scoffing irony.