Jean Meslier, born 1678, in the village of Mazerny, dependency of the
duchy of Rethel, was the son of a serge weaver; brought up in the
country, he nevertheless pursued his studies and succeeded to the
priesthood. At the seminary, where he lived with much regularity, he
devoted himself to the system of Descartes.
Becoming curate of Etrepigny in Champagne and vicar of a little annexed
parish named Bue, he was remarkable for the austerity of his habits.
Devoted in all his duties, every year he gave what remained of his salary
to the poor of his parishes; enthusiastic, and of rigid virtue, he was
very temperate, as much in regard to his appetite as in relation to
women.
MM. Voiri and Delavaux, the one curate of Varq, the other curate of
Boulzicourt, were his confessors, and the only ones with whom he
associated.
The curate Meslier was a rigid partisan of justice, and sometimes
carried his zeal a little too far. The lord of his village, M. de
Touilly, having ill-treated some peasants, he refused to pray for him in
his service. M. de Mailly, Archbishop of Rheims, before whom the case
was brought, condemned him. But the Sunday which followed this decision,
the abbot Meslier stood in his pulpit and complained of the sentence of
the cardinal. "This is," said he, "the general fate of the poor country
priest; the archbishops, who are great lords, scorn them and do not
listen to them. Therefore, let us pray for the lord of this place. We
will pray for Antoine de Touilly, that he may be converted and granted
the grace that he may not wrong the poor and despoil the orphans." His
lordship, who was present at this mortifying supplication, brought new
complaints before the same archbishop, who ordered the curate Meslier to
come to Donchery, where he ill-treated him with abusive language.
There have been scarcely any other events in his life, nor other
benefice, than that of Etrepigny. He died in the odor of sanctity in the
year 1733, fifty-five years old. It is believed that, disgusted with
life, he expressly refused necessary food, because during his sickness
he was not willing to take anything, not even a glass of wine.
At his death he gave all he possessed, which was inconsiderable, to his
parishioners, and desired to be buried in his garden.
They were greatly surprised to find in his house three manuscripts, each
containing three hundred and sixty-six pages, all written by his hand,
signed and entitled by him, "My Testament." This work, which the author
addressed to his parishioners and to M. Leroux, advocate and procurator
for the parliament of Meziers, is a simple refutation of all the
religious dogmas, without excepting one. The grand vicar of Rheims
retained one of the three copies; another was sent to Monsieur
Chauvelin, guardian of the State's seal; the third remained at the
clerk's office of the justiciary of St. Minehould. The Count de Caylus
had one of those three copies in his possession for some time, and soon
afterward more than one hundred were at Paris, sold at ten Louis-d'or
apiece. A dying priest accusing himself of having professed and taught
the Christian religion, made a deeper impression upon the mind than the
"Thoughts of Pascal."
The curate Meslier had written upon a gray paper which enveloped the
copy destined for his parishioners these remarkable words: "I have seen
and recognized the errors, the abuses, the follies, and the wickedness
of men. I have hated and despised them. I did not dare say it during my
life, but I will say it at least in dying, and after my death; and it is
that it may be known, that I write this present memorial in order that
it may serve as a witness of truth to all those who may see and read it
if they choose."
At the beginning of this work is found this document (a kind of
honorable amend, which in his letter to the Count of d'Argental of May
31, 1762, Voltaire qualifies as a preface), addressed to his
parishioners.
"You know," said he, "my brethren, my disinterestedness; I do not
sacrifice my belief to any vile interest. If I embraced a profession so
directly opposed to my sentiments, it was not through cupidity. I obeyed
my parents. I would have preferred to enlighten you sooner if I could
have done it safely. You are witnesses to what I assert. I have not
disgraced my ministry by exacting the requitals, which are a part of it.
"I call heaven to witness that I also thoroughly despised those who
laughed at the simplicity of the blind people, those who furnished
piously considerable sums of money to buy prayers. How horrible this
monopoly! I do not blame the disdain which those who grow rich by your
sweat and your pains, show for their mysteries and their superstitions;
but I detest their insatiable cupidity and the signal pleasure such
fellows take in railing at the ignorance of those whom they carefully
keep in this state of blindness. Let them content themselves with
laughing at their own ease, but at least let them not multiply their
errors by abusing the blind piety of those who, by their simplicity,
procured them such an easy life. You render unto me, my brethren, the
justice that is due me. The sympathy which I manifested for your
troubles saves me from the least suspicion. How often have I performed
gratuitously the functions of my ministry. How often also has my heart
been grieved at not being able to assist you as often and as abundantly
as I could have wished! Have I not always proved to you that I took more
pleasure in giving than in receiving? I carefully avoided exhorting you
to bigotry, and I spoke to you as rarely as possible of our unfortunate
dogmas. It was necessary that I should acquit myself as a priest of my
ministry, but how often have I not suffered within myself when I was
forced to preach to you those pious lies which I despised in my heart.
What a disdain I had for my ministry, and particularly for that
superstitious Mass, and those ridiculous administrations of sacraments,
especially if I was compelled to perform them with the solemnity which
awakened all your piety and all your good faith. What remorse I had for
exciting your credulity! A thousand times upon the point of bursting
forth publicly, I was going to open your eyes, but a fear superior to my
strength restrained me and forced me to silence until my death."
The abbot Meslier had written two letters to the curates of his
neighborhood to inform them of his Testament; he told them that he had
consigned to the chancery of St. Minnehould a copy of his manuscript in
366 leaves in octavo; but he feared it would be suppressed, according to
the bad custom established to prevent the poor from being instructed and
knowing the truth.
The curate Meslier, the most singular phenomenon ever seen among all the
meteors fatal to the Christian religion, worked his whole life secretly
in order to attack the opinions he believed false. To compose his
manuscript against God, against all religion, against the Bible and the
Church, he had no other assistance than the Bible itself, Moreri
Montaigne, and a few fathers.
While the abbot Meslier naively acknowledged that he did not wish to be
burned till after his death, Thomas Woolston, a doctor of Cambridge,
published and sold publicly at London, in his own house, sixty thousand
copies of his "Discourses" against the miracles of Jesus Christ.
It was a very astonishing thing that two priests should at the same time
write against the Christian religion. The curate Meslier has gone
further yet than Woolston; he dares to treat the transport of our
Saviour by the devil upon the mountain, the wedding of Cana, the bread
and the fishes, as absurd fables, injurious to divinity, which were
ignored during three hundred years by the whole Roman Empire, and
finally passed from the lower class to the palace of the emperors, when
policy obliged them to adopt the follies of the people in order the more
easily to subjugate them. The denunciations of the English priest do not
approach those of the Champagne priest. Woolston is sometimes indulgent,
Meslier never. He was a man profoundly embittered by the crimes he
witnessed, for which he holds the Christian religion responsible. There
is no miracle which to him is not an object of contempt and horror; no
prophecy that he does not compare to those of Nostredamus. He wrote thus
against Jesus Christ when in the arms of death, at a time when the most
dissimulating dare not lie, and when the most intrepid tremble. Struck
with the difficulties which he found in Scripture, he inveighed against
it more bitterly than the Acosta and all the Jews, more than the famous
Porphyre, Celse, Iamblique, Julian, Libanius, and all the partisans of
human reason.
There were found among the books of the curate Meslier a printed
manuscript of the Treatise of Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray, upon the
existence of God and His attributes, and the reflections of the Jesuit
Tournemine upon Atheism, to which treatise he added marginal notes
signed by his hand.