WHEN Voltaire was born, the church ruled and owned France. It was
a period of almost universal corruption. The priests were mostly
libertines. The judges were nearly as cruel as venal. The royal palace
was simply a house of assignation. The nobles were heartless, proud,
arrogant, and cruel to the last degree. The common people were treated
as beasts. It took the church a thousand years to bring about this happy
condition of things.
The seeds of the revolution unconsciously were being scattered by
every noble and by every priest. They germinated in the hearts of the
helpless. They were watered by the tears of agony. Blows began to bear
interest. There was a faint longing for blood. Workmen, blackened by the
sun, bent by labor, looked at the white throats of scornful ladies and
thought about cutting them.
In those days witnesses were cross-examined with instruments of torture.
The church was the arsenal of superstition. Miracles, relics, angels
and devils were as common as rags. Voltaire laughed at the evidences,
attacked the pretended facts, held the Bible up to ridicule, and
filled Europe with indignant protests against the cruelty, bigotry, and
injustice of the time.
He was a believer in God, and in some ingenious way excused this God for
allowing the Catholic Church to exist. He had an idea that, originally,
mankind were believers in one God, and practiced all the virtues. Of
course this was a mistake. He imagined that the church had corrupted the
human race. In this he was right.
It may be that, at one time, the church relatively stood for progress,
but when it gained power, it became an obstruction. The system of
Voltaire was contradictory. He described a being of infinite goodness,
who not only destroyed his children with pestilence and famine, but
allowed them to destroy each other. While rejecting the God of the
Bible, he accepted another God, who, to say the least, allowed the
innocent to be burned for love of him.
Voltaire hated tyranny, and loved liberty. His arguments to prove the
existence of a God were just as groundless as those of the reverend
fathers of his day to prove the divinity of Christ, or that Mary was the
mother of God. The theologians of his time maligned and feared him. He
regarded them as a spider does flies. He spread nets for them. They
were caught, and he devoured them for the amusement and benefit of the
public. He was educated by the Jesuits, and sometimes acted like one.
It is fashionable to say that he was not profound, This is because he
was not stupid. In the presence of absurdity he laughed, and was called
irreverent. He thought God would not damn even a priest forever: this
was regarded as blasphemy. He endeavored to prevent Christians from
murdering each other and did what he could to civilize the disciples
of Christ. Had he founded a sect, obtained control of some country, and
burned a few heretics at slow fires, he would have won the admiration,
respect and love of the Christian world. Had he only pretended to
believe all the fables of antiquity, had he mumbled Latin prayers,
counted beads, crossed himself, devoured the flesh of God, and carried
fagots to the feet of philosophy in the name of Christ, he might have
been in heaven this moment, enjoying a sight of the damned.
Instead of doing these things, he willfully closed his eyes to the light
of the gospel, examined the Bible for himself, advocated intellectual
liberty, struck from the brain the fetters of an arrogant faith,
assisted the weak, cried out against the torture of man, appealed to
reason, endeavored to establish universal toleration, succored the
indigent, and defended the oppressed.
These were his crimes. Such a man God would not suffer to die in peace.
If allowed to meet death with a smile, others might follow his example,
until none would be left to light the holy fires of the auto da fe. It
would not do for so great, so successful an enemy of the church, to
die without leaving some shriek of fear, some shudder of remorse, some
ghastly prayer of chattered horror, uttered by lips covered with blood
and foam.
He was an old man of eighty-four. He had been surrounded with the
comforts of life; he was a man of wealth, of genius. Among the literary
men of the world he stood first. God had allowed him to have the
appearance of success. His last years were filled with the intoxication
of flattery. He stood at the summit of his age.
The priests became anxious. They began to fear that God would forget, in
a multiplicity of business, to make a terrible example of Voltaire.
Toward the last of May, 1778, it was whispered in Paris that Voltaire
was dying. Upon the fences of expectation gathered the unclean birds of
superstition, impatiently waiting for their prey.
"Two days before his death, his nephew went to seek the curé of Saint
Sulpice and the Abbé Gautier and brought them into his uncle's sick
chamber, who was informed that they were there. 'Ah, well!' said
Voltaire, 'give them my compliments and my thanks.' The Abbé spoke some
words to him, exhorting him to patience. The curé of Saint Sulpice then
came forward, having announced himself, and asked of Voltaire, elevating
his voice, if he acknowledged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. The
sick man pushed one of his hands against the curé's coif, shoving him
back, and cried, turning abruptly to the other side, 'Let me die in
peace.' The curé seemingly considered his person soiled, and his coif
dishonored, by the touch of the philosopher. He made the nurse give him
a little brushing, and went out with the Abbé Gautier."
He expired, says Wagniere, on the 30th of May, 1778, at about a quarter
past eleven at night, with the most perfect tranquillity. Ten minutes
before his last breath he took the hand of Morand, his _valet de
chambre_, who was watching by him, pressed it and said: "Adieu, my dear
Morand, I am gone." These were his last words.
From this death, so simple and serene, so natural and peaceful; from
these words so utterly destitute of cant or dramatic touch, all the
frightful pictures, all the despairing utterances, have been drawn and
made. From these materials, and from these alone, have been constructed
all the shameless lies about The death of this great and wonderful man,
compared with whom all of his calumniators, dead and living, were and
are but dust and vermin.
Voltaire was the intellectual autocrat of his time. From his throne at
the foot of the Alps he pointed the finger of scorn at every hypocrite
in Europe. He was the pioneer of his century. He was the assassin of
superstition. He left the quiver of ridicule without an arrow. Through
the shadows of faith and fable, through the darkness of myth and
miracle, through the midnight of Christianity, through the blackness of
bigotry, past cathedral and dungeon, past rack and stake, past altar and
throne, he carried, with chivalric hands, the sacred torch of reason.