I shall have to occupy your attention, for some little time, with the
career of this abandoned, unhappy, but most extraordinary man. It was
in his day and by his means that the Atheism which occupies us this
evening became perfected, generalized, and organized for the destruction
of Christianity, Christian civilization, and all religion. He was the
first, and remains still, the greatest of its Apostles. There is not one
of its dark principles which he did not teach and advocate; and from
his writings, and by their means, the intellectual and every other form
of war against the Catholic Church and the cause of Christ are carried
on to this day and will be to the end. His real name was Francis Mary
Arouet, but, for some reason which has never been clearly explained, he
chose to call himself Voltaire. He was the son of good parents, and by
position and education should have been an excellent Catholic. He was
trained by the very Jesuits whom he afterwards so hated and persecuted.
He was destined for the profession of the law, and made good progress
in literary studies. But the corruption of the age in which he lived
soon seized upon him, overmastered him, and bore him along in a current
which in his case did not end in vice only, but in vice which sought
its own justification in Infidelity. From the beginning, the fool said
in his heart “there is no God,” and in the days of Voltaire the number
of these fools was indeed infinite. Never before was vice so rampant
in countries calling themselves Christian. If the Gospel was preached
at all in that age it was certainly to the poor; for the rich, as a
rule—to which there were, thank God, many exceptions—seemed so sunk in
vice as not to believe in a particle of it. The Courts of Europe were,
in general, corrupt to the core; and the Court of the Most Christian
King was perhaps the most abandoned, in a wide sense, of them all.
The Court of Catherine of Russia was a scene of unblushing lewdness.
The Court of Frederick of Prussia was so corrupt, that it cannot be
described without doing violence to decency, and even to humanity. The
Regent Orleans and Louis XV. had carried licence to such an extent, as
to render the Court of Versailles a veritable pandemonium. The vices of
royalty infected the nobles and all others who were so unfortunate as
to be permitted to frequent Courts. Vice, in fact, was the fashion, and
numbers of all classes, not excepting the poorest, wallowed in it. As a
consequence, the libertines of the period hated the Church, which alone,
amidst the universal depravity, raised her voice for purity. They took
up warmly, therefore, the movements which, within or without her pale,
were likely to do her damage. With a sure instinct they sided in France
with Gallicanism and Jansenism; and they welcomed the new Infidelity
which came over from England and Germany, with unconcealed gladness.
Voltaire appeared in French society at this most opportune moment for the
advancement of their views. Witty, sarcastic, gay, vivacious, he soon
made his way amongst the voluptuaries who then filled Paris. His conduct
and habit of ridiculing religion and royalty brought him, however, into
disfavour with the Government, and at the age of twenty-seven we find
him in the Bastile. Liberated from this prison in 1727, but only on
condition of exile, he crossed over to England, where he finally adopted
those Infidel and anti-Christian principles which made him, for the half
century through which he afterwards lived, what Cretineau Joly[1] very
justly calls “the most perfect incarnation of Satan that the world ever
saw.” The Society of Freemasons was just then perfected in London, and
Voltaire at the instance of his Infidel associates joined one of its
lodges; and he left England, where he had been during the years 1726-27
and ’28, an adept in both Infidelity and Freemasonry. He returned to the
Continent with bitterness rankling in his breast against Monarchical
Government which had imprisoned and exiled him, against the Bastile where
he was immured, and, above all, against the Catholic Church and her
Divine Founder. Christ and His Church condemned his excesses, and to the
overthrow of both he devoted himself with an ardour and a malignity more
characteristic, certainly, of a demon than of a man.
A master of French prose hardly ever equalled and never perhaps excelled,
and a graceful and correct versifier, his writings against morality and
religion grew into immense favour with the corrupt reading-public of
his day. He was a perfect adept in the use of ridicule, and he employed
it with remorseless and blasphemous force against everything pure and
sacred. He had as little respect for the honour or welfare of his country
as he had for the sanctity of religion. His ruffian pen attacked the
fair fame of the Maid of Orleans with as little scruple as it cast
shame upon the consecrated servants of Christ. For Christ he had but
one feeling—eternal, contemptuous hatred. His watchword, the concluding
lines of all his letters to his Infidel confederates was for fifty years
_ecrasons nous l’infame_, “let us crush the wretch,” meaning Christ
and his cause. This he boasted was his _delenda est Carthago_. And he
believed he could succeed. “I am tired, said he, of hearing it said that
twelve men sufficed to establish Christianity, and I desire to show that
it requires but one man to pull it down.” A lieutenant of police once
said to him, that, notwithstanding all he wrote, he should never be able
to destroy Christianity. “That is exactly what we shall see,” he replied.
Voltaire was never weary of using his horrible watchword.
Upon the news of the suppression of the Jesuits reaching him, he
exclaimed: “See, one head of the hydra has fallen. I lift my eyes to
heaven and cry ‘crush the wretch.’” We have from himself his reason
for using these blasphemous words. He says, “I finish all my letters
by saying, ‘_Ecrasons l’infame, ecrasez l’infame_.’ ‘Let us crush the
wretch, crush the wretch,’ as Cato used one time to say, _Delenda est
Carthago_, Carthage must be destroyed.” Even at a time when the miscreant
protested the greatest respect for religion to the Court of Rome, he
wrote to Damilaville: “We embrace the philosophers, and we beseech them
to inspire for the wretch all the horror which they can. Let all fall
upon the wretch ably. That which most concerns me is the propagation
of the faith of truth, and the making of the wretch vile, _Delenda est
Carthago_.”
Certainly his determination was strong to do so; and he left no stone
unturned for that end. He was a man of amazing industry; and though his
vanity caused him to quarrel with many of his confreres, he had in his
life time a large school of disciples, which became still more numerous
after his death. He sketched out for them the whole mode of procedure
against the Church. His policy as revealed by the correspondence of
Frederick II. and others[2] with him, was not to commence an immediate
persecution, but first to suppress the Jesuits and all Religious
orders, and to secularize their goods; then to deprive the Pope of
temporal authority, and the Church of property and state recognition.
Primary and higher-class education of a lay and Infidel character
was to be established, the principle of divorce affirmed, and respect
for ecclesiastics lessened and destroyed. Lastly, when the whole body
of the Church should be sufficiently weakened and Infidelity strong
enough, the final blow was to be dealt by the sword of open, relentless
persecution. A reign of terror was to spread over the whole earth, and
to continue while a Christian should be found obstinate enough to adhere
to Christianity. This, of course, was to be followed by a Universal
Brotherhood without marriage, family, property, God, or law, in which
all men would reach that level of social degradation aimed at by the
disciples of Saint Simon, and carried into practice whenever possible, as
attempted by the French Commune.
In the carrying out of his infernal designs against religion and society,
Voltaire had as little scruple in using lying and hypocrisy as Satan
himself is accredited with. In his attacks upon religion he falsified
history and fact. He made a principle of lying, and taught the same vice
to his followers. Writing to his disciple Theriot, he says (Oeuvres, t.
52, p. 326): “Lying is a vice when it does evil. It is a great virtue
when it does good. Be therefore more virtuous than ever. It is necessary
to lie like a devil, not timidly and for a time, but boldly and always.”
He was also, as the school he left behind has been ever since, a
hypocrite. Infidel to the heart’s core, he could, whenever it suited
his purpose, both practise, and even feign a zeal for religion. On the
expectation of a pension from the King, he wrote to M. Argental, a
disciple of his, who reproached him with his hypocrisy and contradictions
in conduct. “If I had a hundred thousand men I know well what I would do;
but as I have not got them, I will go to communion at Easter, and you
may call me a hypocrite as long as you like.” And Voltaire, on getting
his pension, went to communion the year following.[3] It is needless to
say that he was in life, as well as in his writings, immoral as it was
possible for a man to be. He lived without shame and even ostentatiously
in open adultery. He laughed at every moral restraint. He preached
libertinage and practised it. He was the guest and the inmate of the
Court of Frederick of Prussia, where crime reached proportions impossible
to speak of. And lastly, coward, liar, hypocrite, and pander to the
basest passions of humanity, he was finally, like Satan, a murderer
if he had the power to be so. Writing to Damilaville, he says, “The
Christian religion is an infamous religion, an abominable hydra which
must be destroyed by a hundred invisible hands. It is necessary that
the philosophers should course through the streets to destroy it as
missionaries course over earth and sea to propagate it. They ought dare
all things, risk all things, even to be burned, in order to destroy it.
Let us crush the wretch! Crush the wretch!” His doctrine thus expressed
found fatal effect in the French Revolution, and it will obtain effect
whenever his disciples are strong enough in men and means to act. I
have no doubt his teachings have led to all the revolutions of this
century, and will lead to the final attack of Atheism on the Church.
Nor was his hatred confined to Catholicity only. Christians of every
denomination were marked out for destruction by him; and our separated
Christian brethren, who feel glad at seeing his followers triumph over
the Church, might well ponder on these words of his: “Christians,” he
says, “of every form of profession, are beings exceedingly injurious,
fanatics, thieves, dupes, impostors, who lie together with their gospels,
enemies of the human race.” And of the system itself he writes: “The
Christian religion is evidently false, the Christian religion is a sect
which every good man ought to hold in horror. It cannot be approved of
even by those to whom it gives power and honour.” In fact, since his
day, it has been a cardinal point of policy with his followers to take
advantage of the unfortunate differences between the various sects of
Christians in the world and the Church, in order to ruin both; for the
destruction of every form of Christianity, as well as Catholicity, was
the aim of Voltaire, and remains as certainly the aim of his disciples.
They place, of course, the Church and the Vicar of Christ in the first
line of attack, well knowing that if the great Catholic unity could be
destroyed, the work of eradicating every kind of separated Christianity
would be easy. In dealing, therefore, with such a foe as modern Atheism,
so powerfully organized, as we shall see it to be, Protestants as
well as Catholics should guard against its wiles and deceits. They
should, at least, regarding questions such as the religious education
of rising generations, the attempted secularisation of the Sabbath
and state-established, Christian Institutions, and the recognition of
religion by the State, all of which the Atheism of the world now attempts
to destroy, present an unbroken front of determined union. Nothing less,
certainly, can save even the Protestantism, the national, Christian
character of Great Britain and her colonies from impending ruin.
Although Voltaire was as confirmed and malignant a hater of Christ and
of Christianity as ever lived, still he showed from time to time that
his own professed principles of Infidelity were never really believed in
by himself. In health and strength he cried out his blasphemous “crush
the wretch!” but when the moment came for his soul to appear before
the judgment-seat of “the wretch,” his faith was shown and his vaunted
courage failed him.
The miscreant always acted against his better knowledge. His life gives
us many examples of this fact. I will relate one for you. When he broke
a blood vessel on one occasion, he begged his assistants to hurry for
the priest. He confessed, signed with his hand a profession of faith,
asked pardon of God and the Church for his offences, and ordered that his
retractation should be printed in the public newspapers; but, recovering,
he commenced his war upon God anew, and died refusing all spiritual
aid, and crying out in the fury of despair and agony, “I am abandoned
by God and man.” Dr. Fruchen, who witnessed the awful spectacle of his
death, said to his friends, “Would that all who have been seduced by
the writings of Voltaire had been witnesses of his death, it would be
impossible to hold out, in the face of such an awful spectacle.”[4] But
that spectacle was forgotten, and consequently, before ten years passed,
the world saw the effects of his works.
Speaking of the French Revolution, Condorcet, in his “Life of Voltaire,”
says of him, “He did not see all that which he accomplished, but he did
all that which we see. Enlightened observations prove to those who know
how to reflect that the first author of that Great Revolution was without
doubt Voltaire.”
I have thus far spoken of Voltaire and his teachings in order to
introduce with greater clearness the important subject to which I ask
the favour of your attention this evening. It never was the intention of
this man to let his teachings die, or beat the air, so to speak, with
mere words. He determined that his fatal gospel should be perpetuated,
and should bring forth as speedy as possible its fruits of death. Even
in his lifetime, we have evidence that he constantly conspired with
his associates for this end, and that with them he concocted in secret
both the means by which his doctrines should reach all classes in
Europe, and the methods by which civil order and Christianity might be
best destroyed. St. Beauve writes of him and of his, in the _Journal
des Debats_, 8 November, 1852:—“All the correspondence of Voltaire and
D’Alembert is ugly. It smells of the sect, of the conspiracy of the
Brotherhood, of the secret society. From whatever point it is viewed it
does no honour to men who make a principle of lying, and who consider
contempt of their kind the first condition necessary to enlighten them.
‘Enlighten and despise the human race.’ A sure watchword this, and it is
theirs. ‘March on always sneering, my brethren, in the way of truth.’
That is their perpetual refrain.” But not only did he and his, thus
conspire in a manner which might seem to arise naturally from identical
sentiments and aims, but what was of infinitely greater consequence, the
demon, just as their sad gospel was ripe for propagation, called into
existence the most efficacious means possible for its extension amongst
men, and for the wished-for destruction of the Church, of Christian
civilization, and of every form of existing Christianity. This was the
spread amongst those already demoralized by Voltaireanism, of Freemasonry
and its cognate systems of secret Atheistic organization.
This is the point upon which I am most anxious to fix your attention this
evening.