Baron D'Holbach

Max Pearson Cushing (1886-1951) was an American professor, author and choirmaster. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1909, received an A. M. from Columbia University in 1912 and a Ph. D. from there in 1914. He worked in intelligence during World War I. He was the author of: Baron D'Holbach: A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France (1914). "The following study proposes to deal with this attack on religion that preceded and helped to prepare the French Revolution. Similar phenomena are by no means rare in the annals of history; eighteenth-century atheism, however, is of especial interest, standing as it does at the end of a long period of theological and ecclesiastical disintegration and prophesying a reconstruction of society on a purely rational and naturalistic basis. The anti-theistic movement has been so obscured by the less thoroughgoing tendency of deism and by subsequent romanticism that the real issue in the eighteenth century has been largely lost from view."