Here sits he shaping wings to fly;
His heart forebodes a mystery:
He names the name Eternity.
That type of Perfect in his mind
In Nature can he nowhere find,
He sows himself on every wind.
He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend,
And through thick veils to apprehend
A labour working to an end.
TENNYSON, _The Two Voices_.
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I
"_Deo erexit Voltaire_"
The visitor to Geneva whose studies have made him duly acquainted with
the most interesting human personality of all that are associated with
that historic city will never leave the place without making a
pilgrimage to the chateau of Ferney. In that refined and quiet rural
homestead things still remain very much as on the day when the aged
Voltaire left it for the last visit to Paris, where his long life was
worthily ended amid words and deeds of affectionate homage. One may sit
down at the table where was written the most perfect prose, perhaps,
that ever flowed from pen, and look about the little room with its
evidences of plain living and high thinking, until one seems to recall
the eccentric figure of the vanished Master, with his flashes of shrewd
wisdom and caustic wit, his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his
consuming hatred of bigotry and oppression, his merciless contempt for
shams, his boundless enthusiasm of humanity. As we stroll in the park,
that quaint presence goes along with us till all at once in a shady walk
we come upon something highly significant and characteristic, the little
parish church with its Latin inscription over the portal, _Deo erexit
Voltaire_, i. e. "Voltaire built it for God," and as we muse upon it,
the piercing eyes and sardonic but not unkindly smile seem still to
follow us. What meant this eccentric inscription?
When Voltaire became possessor of the manor of Ferney, the church was
badly out of repair, and stood where it obstructed the view from certain
windows of the chateau. So he had it cleared away, and built in a better
spot the new church that is still there. It was duly consecrated, and
the Pope further hallowed it with some relics of ancient saints, and
there for many a year the tenants and dependents of the manor assembled
for divine service. Nowhere in France had Voltaire ever seen a church
dedicated simply to God; it was always to Our Lady of This or Saint
So-and-so of That; always there was some intermediary between the devout
soul and the God of its worship. Not thus should it be with Voltaire's
church, built upon his own estate to minister to the spiritual needs of
his people. It should be dedicated simply and without further
qualification to the worship and service of God. Furthermore, it was
built and dedicated, not by any ecclesiastical or corporate body, but by
the lord of that manor, the individual layman, Voltaire.
This, I say, was highly characteristic and significant. It gave terse
and pointed expression to Voltaire's way of looking at such things.
Church and theology were ignored, and the individual soul was left alone
with its God. The Protestant reformers and other freethinkers had
stopped far short of this. In place of an infallible Church they had
left an infallible Book; if they rejected transubstantiation, they
retained as obligatory such doctrines as those of the incarnation and
atonement; if they laughed at the miracles of mediŠval saints, they
would allow no discredit to be thrown upon those of the apostolic age;
in short, they left standing a large part, if not the larger part, of
the supernatural edifice within which the religious mind of Europe had
so long been sheltered. But Voltaire regarded that whole supernatural
edifice as so much rubbish which was impeding the free development of
the human mind, and ought as quickly as possible to be torn to pieces
and cleared away. His emotions as well as his reason were concerned in
this conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it then existed in France,
was responsible for much atrocious injustice, and in neighbouring lands
the Inquisition still existed. Ecclesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of
ignorance, whatever tended to hold people in darkness and restrain them
from the free and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire hated with
all the intensity of which he was capable. He summed it all up in one
abstract term and personified it as "The Infamous," and the watchword of
that life of tireless vigilance was "Crush the Infamous!" Supernatural
theology had been too often pressed into the service of "The Infamous,"
and for supernatural theology Voltaire could find no place in his scheme
of things. He lost no chance of assailing it with mockery and sarcasm
made terrible by the earnestness of his purpose, until he came in many
quarters to be regarded as the most inveterate antagonist the Church had
ever known.
Yet among the great men of letters in France contemporary with Voltaire,
the most part went immeasurably farther than he, and went in a different
direction withal, for they denied the reality of Religion. Few of them,
indeed, believed in the existence of God, or would have had anything to
do with building a house of worship. It is related of David Hume that
when dining once in a party of eighteen at the house of Baron d'Holbach,
he expressed a doubt as to whether any person could anywhere be found to
avow himself dogmatically an atheist. "Indeed, my dear sir," quoth the
host, "you are this moment sitting at table with seventeen such
persons." Among that group of philosophers were men of great
intelligence and lofty purpose, such as D'Alembert, Diderot, HelvÚtius,
Condorcet, Buffon, men with more of the real spirit of Christianity in
their natures than could be found in half the churches of Christendom.
The roots of their atheism were emotional rather than philosophical. It
was part of the generous but rash and superficial impatience with which
they disowned all connection whatever with a Church that had become
subservient to so much that was bad. Their atheism was one of the fruits
of the vicious policy which had suppressed Huguenotism in France; it was
an early instance of what has since been often observed, that
materialism and atheism are much more apt to flourish in Romanist than
in Protestant countries. The form of religion which is already to some
extent purified and rationalized awakens no such violent revulsion in
free-thinking minds as the form that is more heavily encumbered with
remnants of obsolete primitive thought. Moreover, the rationalizing
religion of Protestant countries is commonly found in alliance with
political freedom. In France under the Old RÚgime, the Catholic religion
was stigmatized as an ally of despotism, as well as a congeries of
absurd doctrines and ceremonies. The best minds felt their common sense
shocked by it no less than their reason. No very deep thinking was done
on the subject; their treatment of it was in general extremely shallow.
The forms which religious sentiment had assumed in the Middle Ages had
become unintelligible; the most highly endowed minds were dead to the
sublimity of Gothic architecture, and saw nothing but grotesque folly
in Dante's poetry. They seriously believed that religious doctrines and
ecclesiastical government were originally elaborate systems of fraud,
devised by sagacious and crafty tyrants for the sole purpose of
enslaving the multitude of mankind. No discrimination was shown. They
were as ready to throw away belief in God as in the miracles of St.
Columba, and to scout at the notion of a future life in the same terms
as those in which they denounced the forged donation of Constantine. The
flippant ease with which they disposed of the greatest questions, in
crass ignorance of the very nature of the problem to be solved, was well
illustrated in the remark of the astronomer Lalande, that he had swept
the entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. A similar
instance of missing the point was furnished about fifty years ago by the
eminent physiologist Moleschott, when he exclaimed, "No thought without
phosphorus," and congratulated himself that he had forever disposed of
the human soul. I am inclined to think that those are the two remarks
most colossal in their silliness that ever appeared in print.
Very different in spirit was the acute reply of Laplace when reminded by
Napoleon that his great treatise on the dynamics of the solar system
contained no allusion to God. "Sire," said Laplace, "I had no need of
that hypothesis." This remark was profound in its truth, for it meant
that in order to give a specific explanation of any single group of
phenomena, it will not do to appeal to divine action, which is equally
the source of all phenomena. Science can deal only with secondary
causes. In the eighteenth century men of science were learning that such
is the case; men like Diderot and D'Alembert had come to realize it, and
they believed that the logical result was atheism. This was because the
only idea of God which they had ever been taught to entertain was the
Latin idea of a God remote from the world and manifested only through
occasional interferences with the order of nature. When they dismissed
this idea they declared themselves atheists. If they had been familiar
with the Greek idea of God as immanent in the world and manifested at
every moment through the orderly sequence of its phenomena, their
conclusions would doubtless have been very different.
To these philosophers Voltaire's unshaken theism seemed a mere bit of
eccentric conservatism. But along with that queer and intensely
independent personality there went a stronger intellectual grasp and a
more calm intellectual vision than belonged to any other Frenchman of
the eighteenth century. In the facts of Nature, despite the lifeless
piecemeal fashion in which they were then studied, Voltaire saw a
rational principle at work which atheism could in nowise account for. To
him the universe seemed full of evidences of beneficent purpose, and
more than once he set forth with eloquence and power the famous
argument from design, which is as old as Xenophon's Memorabilia, and
which received its fullest development at the hands of Paley and the
authors of the Bridgewater Treatises. There is thus yet another
significance added to the little church at Ferney. Not only was it the
sole church in France dedicated simply to God, and not only was its
builder a layman hostile to ecclesiastical doctrines and methods, but he
was almost alone among the eminent freethinkers of his age and country
in believing in God and asserting the everlasting reality of religion.
It is therefore that I have cited Voltaire as a kind of text for the
present discourse; for it is my purpose to show that, apart from all
questions of revelation, the light of nature affords us sufficient
ground for maintaining that religion is fundamentally true and must
endure forever. It appears to me, moreover, that the materialism of the
present day is merely a tradition handed down from the French writers
whom Voltaire combated. When Moleschott made his silly remark about
phosphorus, it was simply an inheritance of silliness from Lalande. When
Haeckel tells us that the doctrine of evolution forbids us to believe in
a future life, it is not because he has rationally deduced such a
conclusion from the doctrine, but because he takes his opinions on such
matters ready-made from Ludwig BŘchner, who is simply an echo of the
eighteenth century atheist La Mettrie. We shall see that the doctrine of
evolution has implications very different from what Haeckel supposes.
But first let me observe in passing that in the English-speaking world
there has never been any such divorce between rationalism and religion
as in France, and among the glories of English literature are such
deeply reverent and profoundly philosophical writings as those of Hooker
and Chillingworth, of Bishop Butler and Jonathan Edwards, and in our own
time of Dr. Martineau. Nowhere in history, perhaps, have faith and
reason been more harmoniously wedded together than in the history of
English Protestantism. But the disturbance that affected France in the
age of Voltaire now affects the whole Christian world, and every
question connected with religion has been probed to depths of which the
existence was scarcely suspected a century ago. One seldom, indeed,
hears the frivolous mockery in which the old French writers dealt so
freely; that was an ebullition of temper called forth by a tyranny that
had come to be a social nuisance. The scepticism of our day is rather
sad than frivolous; it drags people from long cherished notions in spite
of themselves; it spares but few that are active-minded; it invades the
church, and does not stop in the pews to listen but ascends the pulpit
and preaches. There is no refuge anywhere from this doubting and testing
spirit Of the age. In the attitude of civilized men towards the world in
which we live, the change of front has been stupendous; the old
cosmology has been overthrown in headlong ruin, attacks upon doctrines
have multiplied, and rituals, creeds, and Scriptures are overhauled and
criticised, until a young generation grows up knowing nothing of the
sturdy faith of its grandfathers save by hearsay; for it sees everything
in heaven and earth called upon to show its credentials.
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