CHAPTER V.

RELIGION.

I

In examining the Voltairean attack upon religion we have to remember

that it was in the first instance prompted, and throughout its course

stimulated and embittered, by antipathy to the external organisation of

the religion. It was not merely disbelief in a creed, but exasperation

against a church. Two distinct elements lay at the bottom of Voltaire’s

enmity to the peculiar form of monotheism which he found supreme around

him. One of them was the intellectual element of repugnance to a system

of belief that rested on miracles and mysteries irreconcilable with

reason, and was so intimately associated with some of the most odious

types of character and most atrocious actions in the Old Testament,

which undoubtedly contains so many of both. The other was the moral

element of anger against the expounders of this system, their

intolerance of light and hatred of knowledge, their fierce yet

profoundly contemptible struggles with one another, the scandals of

their casuistry, their besotted cruelty. Of these two elements, the

second was, no doubt, if not the earlier in time, at least the stronger

in intensity. It was because he perceived the fruit to be so deadly,

that Voltaire laid the axe to the root of the tree. It is easy to say

that these poisonous Jesuitries and black Jansenisms were no fruit of

the tree, but the produce of a mere graft, which could have been lopped

off without touching the sacred trunk. Voltaire thought otherwise, and

whether he was right or wrong, it is only just to him to keep constantly

before us the egregious failure of Catholicism in his day as a social

force. This is a fact as to which there can be no dispute among persons

with knowledge enough and mental freedom enough to be competent to have

an opinion, and Voltairism can only be fairly weighed if we regard it as

being in the first instance no outbreak of reckless speculative

intelligence, but a righteous social protest against a system socially

pestilent. It was the revival of the worst parts of this system in the

cruelty and obscurantism which broke out after the middle of the

century, that converted Voltaire into an active assailant of belief. But

for that he would pretty certainly have remained tranquilly in the phase

of deism of which some of his early verses are the expression.

Philosophy is truly, as Callicles says in the Gorgias, a most charming

accomplishment for a man to follow at the right age, but to carry

philosophy too far is the undoing of humanity.

Voltaire no doubt deliberately set himself to overthrow the Catholic

theology, as well as the ecclesi astical system which was bound up with

it, and he did so for the very sufficient reason that it has always been

impossible for men to become indulgent in act, while they remained

fanatical in belief. They will not cease to be persecutors, he said,

until they have ceased to be absurd.[175] The object was to secure

tolerance, and tolerance could only be expected as the product of

indifference, and indifference could be spread most surely by throwing

the fullest light of reason and common sense on the mystical foundations

of revealed religion. To stop short at the inculcation of charity and

indulgence was to surrender the cause; for how should the mere homilies

of a secular moralist soften those whom the direct injunctions of a

deity and his inspired apostles, their own acknowledged masters, failed

to make charitable? It was essential that the superstitions in which

intolerance had its root should be proved detestable and ridiculous.

When men had learnt to laugh at superstition, then they would perceive

how abominable is the oppressive fanaticism which is its champion.

It is hardly possible to deny the service which Protestantism rendered

in preventing the revolution from Catholicism to scientific modes of

thought from being that violent, abrupt, and irreconcilable breach,

which we now observe in France and Italy, when we remember that the

cause of toleration was systematically defended in England by men who as

systematically defended the cause of Christianity. The Liberty of

Prophesying, in which the expediency of tolerance was based on the

difficulty of being sure that we are right, was written by one of the

most devout and orthodox divines; while the famous Letters on Toleration

(1689), in which the truly remarkable step is taken of confining the

functions of civil government to men’s civil interests and the things of

this world, were the work of the same Locke who vindicated the

Reasonableness of Christianity.[176] The English Deists pressed home in

a very effectual way the deduction of universal freedom of speech from

the first maxims of Protestantism, and their inference was practically

admitted.[177] Hence there was no inseparable association between

adherence to the old religious ideas and the prohibition of free speech

in spirituals, and on the other hand there was no obligation on the part

of those who claimed free speech to attack a church which did not refuse

their claim.

In France the strictly repressive policy of the church in the eighteenth

century, sometimes bloody and cruel as in the persecution of the

Protestants, sometimes minutely vexatious as in the persecution of the

men of letters, but always stubborn and lynx-eyed, had the natural

effect of making it a point of honour with most of those who valued

liberty to hurl themselves upon the religious system, of which rigorous

intolerance was so prominent a characteristic. The Protestant dilution

of the theological spirit seems thus to be in the long run a more

effective preparation for decisive abandonment of it, than its virulent

dissolution in the biting acids of Voltairism, because within limits the

slower these great transformations are in accomplishing themselves, the

better it is for many of the most precious and most tender parts of

human character. Our present contention is that the attitude of the

religionists left no alternative. It is best that creeds, like men who

have done the work of the day, should die the slow deaths of nature, yet

it is counted lawful to raise an armed hand upon the brigand who seeks

the life of another.

Voltaire to the end of his course contended that the church only was to

blame for the storm which overtook her teaching in the later years, when

his own courageous attack had inspired a host of others, less brilliant

but not any less embittered, to throw themselves on the reeling enemy.

The cause of the inundation of Europe by the literature of negativism

and repudiation was to be sought first of all in the fierce theological

disputes which revolted the best of the laity. Of this violent revulsion

of feeling Voltaire himself was the great organ. He furnished its

justification, and nourished its fire, and invested it with a splendid

lustre. Even when with the timidity of extreme age he seemed to

deprecate the growing ferocity of the attack, he still taunted the

clerical party with their own folly in allowing a mean and egotistic

virulence to override every consideration of true wisdom and policy.

‘Now,’ he wrote in 1768, ‘a revolution has been accomplished in the

human mind, that nothing again can ever arrest. They would have

prevented this revolution, if they had been sage and moderate. The

quarrels of Jansenists and Molinists have done more harm to the

Christian religion than could have been done by four emperors like

Julian one after another.’[178]

It cannot be too often repeated that the Christianity which Voltaire

assailed was not that of the Sermon on the Mount, for there was not a

man then alive more keenly sensible than he was of the generous humanity

which is there enjoined with a force that so strangely touches the

heart, nor one who was on the whole, in spite of constitutional

infirmities and words which were far worse than his deeds, more ardent

and persevering in its practice. Still less was he the enemy of a form

of Christian profession which now fascinates many fine and subtle minds,

and which starting from the assumption that there are certain inborn

cravings in the human heart, constant, profound, and inextinguishable,

discerns in the long religious tradition an adequate proof that the

mystic faith in the incarnation, and in the spiritual facts which pour

like rays from that awful centre, are the highest satisfaction which a

divine will has as yet been pleased to establish for all these

yearnings of the race of men. This graceful development of belief,

emancipated from dogma and reducing so many substantial bodies to pale

shades, so many articles once held as solid realities to the strange

tenuity of dreams, was not the Christianity of Voltaire’s time, any more

than it was that of the Holy Office. There was nothing resembling the

present popularity of a treatment which gives generals so immense a

preponderance over particulars—somewhat to the neglect of the old saying

about the snare that lies hidden in generals, many persons being

tolerably indifferent about the _dolus_ so long as they can make sure of

the _latet_. He attacked a definite theology, not a theosophy. We may,

indeed, imagine the kind of questions which he would have asked of one

pressing such a doctrine on his acceptance; how he would have sought the

grounds for calling aspirations universal, which the numerical majority

of the human race appear to have been without, and the grounds for

making subjective yearnings the test and the measure of the truth of

definite objective records; how he would have prayed to be instructed of

these cravings, whether they spring up spontaneously, or are the

products of spiritual self-indulgence, and also of the precise manner in

which they come to be satisfied and soothed by the momentary appearance

of a humane figure far off upon the earth; how he would have paused to

consider the intelligibility of so overwhelming a wonder as the

incarnation having been wrought, for the benefit of so infinitesimally

small a fragment of mankind. We can imagine this and much else, but

Voltaire would never have stirred a finger to attack a mysticism which

is not aggressive, and can hardly be other than negatively hurtful.

If any one had maintained against Voltaire that the aspirations after a

future life, the longing for some token that the deity watches over his

creatures and is moved by a tender solicitude for them, and the other

spiritual desires alleged to be instinctive in men, constitute as

trustworthy and firm a guide to truth as the logical reason, we may be

sure that he would have forgiven what he must have considered an

enervating abnegation of intelligence, for the sake of the humane, if

not very actively improving, course of life to which this kind of

pietism is wont to lead. He might possibly have entertained a little

contempt for them, but it would have been quiet contempt and unspoken.

There is no case of Voltaire mocking at any set of men who lived good

lives. He did not mock the English Quakers. He doubtless attacked many

of the beliefs which good men hold sacred, but if good men take up their

abode under the same roof which shelters the children of darkness and

wrong, it is not the fault of Voltaire if they are hit by the smooth

stones shot from his sling against their unworthy comrades. The object

of his assault was that amalgam of metaphysical subtleties, degrading

legends, false miracles, and narrow depraving conceptions of divine

government which made the starting-point and vantage-ground of those

ecclesiastical oppressors, whom he habitually and justly designated the

enemies of the human race. The evil and the good, the old purity and the

superadded corruptions, were all so inextricably bound up in the

Catholicism of the eighteenth century, that it was impossible to a deal

a blow to the one without risk of harm to the other. The method was

desperate, but then the enemy was a true Chimæra, a monster sodden in

black corruption, with whom in the breast of a humane man there could be

no terms.

The popes during the Voltairean period were above the average in virtue

and intelligence, but their power was entirely overshadowed by that

wonderful order which had assumed all effective spiritual supremacy for

something like two centuries. Nor was this order the only retrogressive

influence. The eighteenth century was the century not only of the Sacré

Cœur, but of the miracles of the dead abbé Pâris, transactions in which

Jansenist emulated Jesuit in dragging men and women into the deepest

slough of superstition. A Roman augur fresh from the inspection of the

sacrificial entrails would have had a right to despise the priests who

invented an object for the adoration of men in the diseased and hideous

visions of Mary Alacoque. The man who sells rain to savages may almost

be held to add to the self-respect of the race, if you contrast him with

the convulsionnaires and the fanatics who were transported by their

revolting performances.[179]

France is the country where reactions are most rapid and most violent.

Nowhere else can the reformer count so surely on seeing the completion

of his reform followed so instantly by the triumph of its adversaries.

The expulsion of the Jesuits, under circumstances of marked and

uncompromising harshness, was not consummated, before the tide of

religious bigotry flowed in from the opposite shore, and swelled to a

portentous height. The exultation of the philosophers at the coming fall

of their old foes, was instantly checked by the yet worse things which

befell them and their principles at the hands of new enemies. The reign

of the Jansenists was speedily pronounced more hateful than the reign of

the Jesuits. Various accommodations were possible with heaven, so long

as the Jesuits had credit, but the Jansenists were pitiless.[180]

The parliament or supreme judicial tribunal of Paris[181] was Jansenist,

mainly out of political hatred of the Jesuits, partly from a hostility,

very easily explained, to every manifestation of ultramontane feeling

and influence, partly from a professional jealousy of the clergy, but

partly also because the austere predestinarian dogma, and the

metaphysical theology which brought it into supreme prominence, seem

often to have had an unexplained affinity for serious minds trained in

legal ideas and their application. The Jesuits had systematically

abstained as far as was possible from purely speculative theology.

Suarez is pronounced one of the greatest writers in speculative ethics

and jurisprudence; but in the technical metaphysics of theology the

Jesuits with all their literary industry did not greatly care to

exercise themselves. Their task was social and practical, and as

confessors, directors, preachers, and instructors, they had naturally

paid less attention to abstract thought than to the arts of eloquence,

address, and pliancy. Then, too, in doctrine they had uniformily clung

to the softer, more amiable, more worldly, less repulsive,

interpretation of the eternally embarrassing claims of grace, election,

free-will. The Augustinian, Calvinistic, or Jansenist view of the

impotence of will and the saving importance of grace is the answer of

souls eager to feel immediate individual contact with a Supreme Being.

The Jesuits and their power represented extremely different sentiments,

fundamentally religious, but still fundamentally social also, the desire

of men for sympathetic and considerate guidance in conduct, and their

craving for such a unity of the external ordering of the faith as should

leave them undistracted to live their lives. The former concentrated

feelings upon the relations of men directly and immediately with a

Supreme Being; the latter upon their relations with this Being only

mediately, through their relations with one another, and with the church

to which a measure of divinity had been attributed. Hence the decline of

the Jesuits assumed the form of a depravation of morals, while the

Jansenists held more and more tightly to a narrow and bigoted

correctness of belief. The parliament was willing to resist a Molinist

archbishop and his satellites, when they refused burial to all who

should die without having received a certificate of conformity to the

famous bull Unigenitus, which proscribed Jansenist opinion.[182] But

none the less for this was it bent on suppressing the common enemy, who

despised the bull and the Five propositions, Molina and Jansenius,

archbishop Beaumont and Quesnel, all equally. Voltaire’s natural

sagacity made him alive to the fact, which perhaps remains as true now

as then, that the professional and middle classes are a worse enemy of

liberal opinion and are more intolerant than the remnants of the old

aristocratic orders. He says to D’Alembert, ‘You are right in declaring

yourself the enemy of the great and their flatterers; still, the great

protect one upon occasion, they despise the Infamous, and they will not

persecute philosophers; but as for your pedants of Paris, who have

bought their office, as for those insolent bourgeois, half fanatics,

half imbecile, they can do nothing but mischief.’[183] He had not learnt

to look away from both classes, professional and aristocratic alike, to

that third estate where the voice of the reformer has always found the

first response. Still what he said was true as against the lawyers,

whose vision perhaps never extends beyond the improvement of that mere

surface of order with which their profession is concerned. The

Parliament of Paris was the eager ally of the bigots of the court in

1757, in fulminating deadly edicts against the Encyclopædia and all

concerned in its production or circulation. In 1762, the year of the

publication of Emile and the Contrat Social, not all the influence of

Rousseau’s powerful protectors could prevent the launching of a decree

of arrest against him. Bloodier measures were not wanting.

In 1762 Morellet had published under the title of a Manual for

Inquisitors a selection of the most cruel and revolting portions of the

procedure of the Holy Office, drawn from the Directorium Inquisitorium

of Eymeric, a grand inquisitor of the fourteenth century. The

cold-blooded cruelties of the regulations, which were thus brought into

the light of the eighteenth century, created the most profound sensation

among the rapidly increasing adherents of tolerance and humanity.

Voltaire was intensely stirred by this resuscitation of horrors that he

mistook for dead. It made the same impression upon him, he said, as the

bleeding body of Caesar made upon the men of Rome.[184] But he soon

found that it was an error to impute a special cruelty to the spiritual

power. Malesherbes, in giving Morellet the requisite permission to print

his Manual, had amazed his friend by telling him, that though he might

suppose he was giving to the world a collection of extraordinary facts

and unheard of processes, yet in truth the jurisprudence of Eymeric and

his inquisition was as nearly as possible identical with the criminal

jurisprudence of France at that very moment.[185] This was very soon to

be proved.

The bigots, infuriated by the blows which were destroying the Jesuits,

hunted out against heretical enemies some forgotten portions of this

terrible jurisprudence. A protestant pastor, Rochette, was hung for

exercising his functions in Languedoc. The Catholics on the occasion of

the arrest of Rochette were summoned by sound of tocsin, and three young

Protestants, who were brothers, fearing massacre in the midst of the

agitation, took up their arms: for this offence they were convicted of

rebellion, and had their heads struck off.[186] It became painfully

clear how great a mistake it was to suppose the clergy touched with some

special curse of cruelty. Then, as usually, for good or for evil, they

were on about the same moral level with an immense number of laymen, and

were not much more than the incarnation of the average darkness of the

hour. If Eymeric’s procedure only copied the ordinary criminal

jurisprudence, the bigotry of the ecclesiastics was accurately reflected

in the bigotry of the secular tribunals. The Protestant Calas was broken

on the wheel (1762), because his son had been found dead, and some one

chose to say that the father had killed him, to prevent him from turning

Catholic. There was not the smallest fragment of evidence, direct or

indirect, for a single link in the chain of circumstances on which the

unfortunate man’s guilt depended; while there were many facts which made

the theory of his guilt the most improbable that could have been brought

forward. The widow and the children of Calas were put to the torture,

and eventually fled to Geneva to take refuge with Voltaire. During the

same year the same tribunal, the parliament of Toulouse, did its best to

repeat this atrocity in the case of Sirven. Sirven was a Protestant, and

his daughter had been with perfect legality snatched away from him, and

shut up in a convent, there to be better instructed in the faith. She

ran away, and was found at the bottom of a well. Sirven was accused of

murdering his daughter, and he only escaped the wheel by prompt flight.

His wife perished of misery amid the snows of the Cevennes, and he

joined the wretched family of Calas at Geneva, where the same generous

man furnished shelter and protection.

In the north of France the fire of intolerance burnt at least as hotly

as in the south. At Abbeville a crucifix was found to have been

mutilated in the night. Two lads of eighteen, to one of whom Frederick

gave shelter in Prussia, were accused under cover of the sacrilege, and

La Barre was condemned by the tribunal of Amiens, at the instance of the

bishop, to have tongue and right hand cut off, and then be burnt alive;

a sentence that was presently commuted by the Parliament of Paris to

decapitation (1766). There was no proof whatever that either of the two

youths was in any way concerned in the outrage. The bishop of the

diocese had issued monitory proclamations, and conducted a solemn

procession to the insulted crucifix. The imagination of the town was

kindled, and the sacrilege became the universal talk of a people growing

more and more excited. Rumour ran that a new sect was being formed,

which was for breaking all the crucifixes, which threw the host on the

ground and cut it with knives. There were women who declared that they

had seen these things. All the horrible stories were revived which had

been believed against the Jews in the middle ages. A citizen took

advantage of this fierce agitation to gratify a private grudge against a

relative of La Barre. He set inquiries on foot among the lowest persons

for proof that the youth had been concerned in the original crime. By

one means or another he got together material enough to support an

indictment. Proceedings once begun, a crowd of informers rose up. It was

deposed that La Barre and D’Etallonde had passed within thirty yards of

the sacred procession without removing their hats, that La Barre had

spoken irreverently of the Virgin Mary, that he had been heard to sing

unseemly songs and recite ribald litanies. This testimony, given with a

vagueness that ought to have proved it legally valueless, was the fruit

of the episcopal monitory, which as at Toulouse in the case of Calas,

virtually incited the dregs of the people to bring accusations against

their superiors, and menaced a man with the pains of hell if he should

refuse to put his neighbour in peril of his life. The tribunal, as

excited as the witnesses and the rest of the public, relied on a royal

ordinance of 1682, directed against sacrilege and superstition and

designed to put down sorcery. In the sentence inflicting so bloody a

punishment, the offence was described as consisting in singing

abominable songs against the Virgin Mary.[187] To exact such a penalty

for such a delinquency was to make human life a mere plaything for the

ignorant passion of the populace and the intellectual confusion of the

tribunals. These atrocities kindled in Voltaire a blaze of anger and

pity, that remains among the things of which humanity has most reason to

be proud. Everybody who has read much of the French writing of the

middle of the eighteenth century, is conscious from time to time of a

sound of mocking and sardonic laughter in it. This laugh of the

eighteenth century has been too often misunderstood as the expression of

a cynical hardness of heart, proving the hollowness of the humanitarian

pretensions in the midst of which it is heard. It was in truth something

very different; it was the form in which men sought a little relief from

the monotony of the abominations which oppressed them, and from whose

taint they had such difficulty to escape. This refrain, that after all a

man can do nothing better than laugh, apparently so shallow and inhuman,

in reality so penetrated with melancholy, we may count most certainly

on finding at the close of the narration of some more than usually

iniquitous or imbecile exploit of those in authority. It was when the

thought of the political and social and intellectual degradation of

their country became too vivid to be endured, that men like Voltaire and

D’Alembert would abruptly turn away from it, and in the bitterness of

their impotence cry that there was nothing for it but to take the world

and all that befalls therein in merriment. It was the grimacing of a man

who jests when he is perishing of hunger, or is shrinking under knife or

cautery. Thus D’Alembert having given Voltaire an account of the

execution of the unfortunate La Barre, in words that show how intensely

his own narrative was afflicting him, suddenly concludes by saying that

he will add no more on this auto-da-fé, so honourable to the French

nation, for it made him ill-humoured, and he meant only to mock at

whatever might happen.[188] But Voltaire could not rest thus. The

thought of so hateful a crime, perpetrated by a tribunal of justice,

clothed him in the shirt of Nessus. All aflame, he wrote to D’Alembert

with noble impetuosity:

“This is no longer a time for jesting: witty things do not go well with

massacres. What? These Busirises in wigs destroy in the midst of

horrible tortures children of sixteen! And that in face of the verdict

of ten upright and humane judges! And the victim suffers it! People talk

about it for a moment, and the next they are hastening to the comic

opera; and barbarity, become the more insolent for our silence, will

to-morrow cut throats juridically at pleasure. Here Calas broken on the

wheel, there Sirven condemned to be hung, further off a gag thrust into

the mouth of a lieutenant-general, a fortnight after that five youths

condemned to the flames for extravagances that deserved nothing worse

than Saint Lazare. Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is

the country rather of the Saint Bartholomew massacre. Why, the

Inquisition would not have ventured to do what these Jansenist judges

have done.”[189] When he had received D’Alembert’s letter, ending as we

have seen, his remonstrance waxed vehement: ‘What, you would be content

to laugh? We ought rather to resolve to seek vengeance, or at any rate

to leave a coimtry where day after day such horrors are committed....

No, once more, I cannot bear that you should finish your letter by

saying, I mean to laugh. Ah, my friend, is it a time for laughing?

Did men laugh when they saw Phalaris’s bull being made red-hot?’[190]

This revival in the tribunals of Paris and the provincial towns alike,

of the ignorant fanaticism and the unscientific jurisprudence of the

most unenlightened times, was the more bitter and insupportable from the

new light which shone around such horrors. Beccaria’s treatise on

Offences and Penalties had just been translated into French by Morellet,

and furnished a strange commentary upon the atrocities of Toulouse and

Abbeville. It seemed, men said, as if at every striking vindication of

the rights of humanity the genius of cruelty broke its chains, and, to

prove the futility of all such vindications, inspired new acts of

barbarism and violence.[191] The philosophic group had yielded to a

premature exultation, and in their inexperience supposed that they who

planted the tree should see the gathering-in of the fruit. The reign of

reason was believed to be close at hand, and this belief made the

visible recrudescence of fanatical unreason signally insupportable. It

is a high honour to Voltaire and his disciples that the trial did not

prove too strong for their faith, and that when they saw how far too

sanguine they had been, they were more astonished than they were

discouraged, and their energy redoubled with the demands made upon it.

The meaner partisans of an orthodoxy which can only make wholly sure of

itself by injustice to adversaries, have always loved to paint the

Voltairean school in the character of demons, enjoying their work of

destruction with a sportive and impish delight. They may have rejoiced

in their strength so long as they cherished the illusion that those who

first kindled the torch should also complete the long course and bear

the lamp to the goal. When the gravity of the enterprise showed itself

before them, they remained alert with all courage, but they ceased to

fancy that courage necessarily makes men happy. The mantle of

philosophy was rent in a hundred places, and bitter winds entered at a

hundred holes, but they only drew it the more closely around them.[192]

At the very last Voltaire seems to have seen something of the vast space

which every ray of light has to traverse before it reaches the eye of

the common understanding. ‘I now perceive,’ he wrote the year before his

death, ‘that we must still wait three or four hundred years. One day it

cannot but be that good men win their cause; but before that glorious

day arrives how many disgusts have we to undergo, how many dark

persecutions, without reckoning the La Barres, of whom from time to time

they will make an auto-da-fé’[193] To speak thus was to recognise the

true character of the revolution, and the many elements which go to the

transformation of an old society. To speak thus, too, was to mark the

true character of the sincere lover of human progress, the soul of

steadfast patience and strong hope, mingled with many a pang for the

far-off and slow-coming good.

It was a natural thing to identify the Jesuits with the strongest part

of the old society, because their organisation was both the strongest

and most striking of its external supports. Their suppression, though

not to be dispensed with except on the condition of an ultimate

overthrow of morality and an extinction of intellectual light, had one

effect which the statesmen of the time could hardly be expected to see,

and which has not been enough considered. Just as the papacy by the

fourteenth century had become more and more exclusively a temporal

power, so the Jesuits by the middle of the eighteenth had become more

and more a commercial power. They were a powerful trading corporation,

and it was as merchants, rather than as casuists and directors of

conscience, that they finally came into collision with secular authority

in France, Portugal, and Spain. Now since the revival of the order it

has been exclusively engaged in the contest for spiritual supremacy, and

for as much of temporal power as has seemed essential to its security.

This, however, is only one of the evils which counterbalance the

advantages of every progressive measure; for, alas, when the statesman

believes most confidently that he has advanced by a league, a very few

years show him or others that his league was after all no more than an

ell or two.

The reactionary outburst of fanaticism for which the humiliation of the

Jesuits was a signal, only showed how well founded the Voltairean

allegations as to the depraving effects of the existing system of

religion had really been. It was the verification of all that Voltaire

ever said against the system, and demonstrated both the virulence and

the tenacity of the influences which Catholicism in the days of its

degradation had exerted over the character of the nation. It was most

illogical to expect a people who had been bred in the Catholic tradition

suddenly to welcome its enemies. If Catholicism had trained men up to

the temper which seeks the light and loves it, how should it have

deserved animosity? Nearly all lovers of improvement are apt in the

heat of a generous enthusiasm to forget that if all the world were ready

to embrace their cause, their improvement could hardly be needed. It is

one of the hardest conditions of things that the more numerous and

resolute the enemies of reform, then the more unmistakably urgent the

necessity for it. It was just because the cruelty, persecution, and

darkness, in the last ten years of the reign of Lewis XV. were things

possible, that the onslaught upon Catholicism was justifiable and

praiseworthy. They showed the depth and strength of the forces of the

old society, and they foreshadowed the violence which marked its

dissolution. If people had remembered in 1789 how few years separated

them from the wide-spread fanaticism which darkened the last days of

Voltaire, they might have calculated better how few years separated them

from the Napoleonic Concordat.

No permanent transformation of a society, we may be sure, can ever take

place until a transformation has been accomplished in the spiritual

basis of thought. Voltaire may have distinctly seen this and formulated

it to himself, or not; in any case, he steered his own course exactly as

he would have done if he had seen it. As M. Guizot expresses it, the

separation between the spiritual and temporal orders was never real in

Europe except in the eighteenth century, when for the first time the

spiritual order developed itself entirely apart from the temporal

order.[194] Thus Voltaire acquiesced without murmur or reproach in the

conditions of political absolutism, and the disgrace and ruin which the

nullity of the government brought upon his country in the Seven Years’

War, keenly as he felt it, yet provoked no thought of temporal changes.

His correspondence in that fatal time is marked by a startling apathy

about public events, and even Rossbach seems not to move him to seek its

causes. If we compare his joyful enthusiasm at the accession of Turgot

to power in 1774, we can have no doubt that this strange numbness of

feeling was only the silence of a wise man despairing of saying or

seeing anything useful, and not the criminal folly of a bad citizen to

whom the welfare of his country is not dear. The disasters of France

were as serious to him as to any one else, as may be plainly seen under

the assumed philosophy with which his vivacious spirit loved to veil

real feeling; but the impossibility of doing anything, even of taking a

part in the process with which we English are so familiar as the forming

of public opinion, drove him for consolation to the field where he was

certain of doing efficient work.[195] Writing in 1761, a year of

crushing national loss, he says to one of the oldest and most intimate

of his correspondents: ‘There is nothing to laugh at in all this. I am

struck to the heart. Our only resource is in the promptest and most

humiliating peace. I always fancy, when some overwhelming disaster

arrives, that the French will be serious for six weeks. I have not yet

been able to disabuse myself of this notion.’[196] Voltaire was

penetrated by the spirit of action, and he perceived and regretted that

the organisation of France did not permit of the effective action of

private individuals in the field of politics.[197] There are lines in

the Henriade extolling the freedom of England,[198] and he sometimes

indulges in the commonplaces of a literary republicanism; but turning to

the portion of his works which his editors have classified as political,

we scarcely find much beyond the documents, and they are important and

interesting enough, still not truly political, that relate to the

various affairs of Calas, La Barre, and others, in which he exposed the

atrocities of the tribunals. So far as they come into the region of

politics at all, it is only to assail the overt and direct injustice

done to society by the institutions, privileges, and pretensions of the

church. He constantly attacks in a great variety of forms the material

mischief inflicted on society by the vast numbers of monks, mendicant or

other; their unproductive lives, the burden of their maintenance

weighing upon more industrious subjects, the restriction of population

occasioned by their celibacy. The direct refusal of the clergy in 1750

to consent to pay their share of the taxes like other citizens, though

owning as much as a fifth of all the property in the realm, moved him to

insist in a vigorous pamphlet that the distinction in a kingdom between

spiritual and temporal powers is a relic of barbarism; that it is

monstrous to permit a body of men to say, Let those pay who work, we

ought not to pay because we are idle; that superstition inevitably tends

to make bad citizens, and therefore princes ought to protect philosophy

which destroys superstition.[199]

Voltaire’s task, however, was never directly political, but spiritual,

to shake the foundations of that religious system which professed to be

founded on the revelation of Christ. Was he not right? If we find

ourselves walking amid a generation of cruel and unjust and darkened

spirits, we may be assured that it is their beliefs on what they deem

highest that have made them so. There is no counting with certainty on

the justice of men who are capable of fashioning and worshipping an

unjust divinity, nor on their humanity so long as they incorporate

inhuman motives in their most sacred dogma, nor on their reasonableness

while they rigorously decline to accept reason as a test of truth.

It is necessary to admit from the point of view of impartial criticism,

that Voltaire had one defect of character, of extreme importance in a

leader of this memorable and direct attack. With all his enthusiasm for

things noble and lofty, generous and compassionate, he missed the

peculiar emotion of holiness, the soul and life alike of the words of

Christ and Saint Paul, that indefinable secret of the long hold of

mystic superstition over so many high natures, otherwise entirely

prepared for the brightness of the rational day. From this impalpable

essence which magically surrounds us with the mysterious and subtle

atmosphere of the unseen, changing distances and proportions, adding new

faculties of sight and purpose, extinguishing the flames of disorderly

passion in a flood of truly divine aspiration, we have to confess that

the virtue went out in the presence of Voltaire. To admire Voltaire,

cried a man who detested him, is the sign of a corrupt heart, and if

anybody is drawn to his works, then be very sure that God does not love

such an one.[200] The truth of which that is so vehement a paraphrase

amounts to this, that Voltaire has said no word, nor even shown an

indirect appreciation of any word said by another, which stirs or

expands the emotional susceptibility, indefinite exultation, and

far-swelling inner harmony, which De Maistre and others have known as

the love of God, and for which a better name, as covering most varieties

of form and manifestation, is holiness, deepest of all the words that

defy definition. Through the affronts which his reason received from

certain pretensions both in the writers and in some of those whose

actions they commemorated, this sublime trait in the Bible, in both

portions of it, was unhappily lost to Voltaire. He had no ear for the

finer vibrations of the spiritual voice. This had no concern in the fact

that he hated and despised, and was eager that others should hate and

despise, the religious forms that ruled France in his day. The

Christianity which he assailed was as little touched as Voltairism

itself with that spirit of holiness which poured itself round the lives

and words of the two founders, the great master and the great apostle.

The more deeply imbued a man was with this spirit, the more ardently

would he crave the demolition of that Infamous in belief and in

practice, which poisoned the stream of holiness in its springs, and shed

pestilence along its banks, and choked its issues in barrenness and

corruption.

The point where the failure of this quality in Voltaire was especially a

source of weakness to his attack, is to be found in the crippling of his

historic imagination, and the inability which this inflicted upon him of

conceiving the true meaning and lowest roots of the Catholic legend. The

middle age between himself and the polytheism of the Empire was a

parched desert to him and to all his school, just as to the Protestant

the interval between the apostles and Luther is a long night of unclean

things. He saw only a besotted people led in chains by a crafty

priesthood; he heard only the unending repetition of records that were

fictitious, and dogmas that drew a curtain of darkness over the

understanding. Men spoke to him of the mild beams of Christian charity,

and where they pointed he saw only the yellow glare of the stake; they

talked of the gentle solace of Christian faith, and he heard only the

shrieks of the thousands and tens of thousands whom faithful Christian

persecutors had racked, strangled, gibbeted, burnt, broken on the

wheel. Through the steam of innocent blood which Christians for the

honour of their belief had spilt in every quarter of the known world,

the blood of Jews, Moors, Indians, and all the vast holocausts of

heretical sects and people in eastern and western Europe, he saw only

dismal tracts of intellectual darkness, and heard only the humming of

the doctors, as they served forth to congregations of poor men hungering

for spiritual sustenance the draff of theological superstition.

This vehement and blinding antipathy arose partly from the intense force

with which the existing aspect of Catholicism recalled all that was

worst, and shut out all that was best in its former history. One cannot

fairly expect the man who is in the grip of a decrepit tyrant, to do

absolutely full justice to the seemly deeds and gracious promises of his

tormentor’s youth. But partly also this blindness arose from the fact

that Voltaire measured the achievements of Catholicism by the magnitude

of its pretensions. He took its supernatural claims seriously, and his

intelligence was exasperated beyond control by the amazing disproportion

and incongruity between these claims and the most conspicuous of the

actual results. Those who have parted company with a religion, as

Voltaire had parted company with Christianity, can only be counted upon

to award the well-earned praise to its better part, after they have

planted themselves stably on the assumption that the given religion is a

human and natural force like another.

The just historic calm on which our modern prides himself, is only

possible in proportion to the mature completeness with which he takes

for granted, and believes that those to whom he speaks will take for

granted, the absence of supernatural intervention in the processes of

religious action and development. He is absolutely undisturbed by the

thought of that claim, which was omnipotent until Voltaire came to do

deadly battle with it, of Christianity to be a crowning miracle of

divine favour, which should raise men to be only a little lower than the

angels, and should be the instrument for pouring out upon them an

ever-flowing stream of special and extraordinary grace. It is not until

the idea has dropped out of our minds of the great fathers of the church

as saints, that we are free to perceive what services they rendered as

statesmen, and it is only when men have ceased to dispute whether

Christianity was a revelation, that they have eyes to see what services

it has rendered as a system. But in Voltaire’s time, if Catholicism was

justified historically, it was believed dogmatically, and therefore was

to be attacked dogmatically also. The surrender of the written legend

has never hindered its champions from taking ground which implied some

esoteric revelation, that proves to be some special interpretation of

the written legend. So long as the thinker is busy disproving the

position that a man who happens to live on a certain part of the globe

is a being of such singular and exceptional consequence in the universe

as to be held worthy by supreme heavenly powers of receiving a

miraculous message and the promise of this and that unspeakable

privilege in indescribable worlds to come, so long he is not likely to

weigh very fairly the effects of the belief in such power, messages, and

privileges, on the education and advancement of this world. The modern

historic justice which is done to Catholicism is due to the

establishment of a series of convictions that civilisation is a

structure which man by his own right arm has raised for himself, that it

has been exposed to many an era of storm and stress, and to manifold

influences which have been perpetually destroying portions of the great

edifice, adding fresh parts, modifying the old, by an interminable

succession of changes, resounding and volcanic, or still and

imperceptible; that the danger of destruction was never so terrible as

in the days of the dissolution of the old Roman society; that in this

prolonged crisis the Christian church emerged, first by its organisation

and the ability of some of its chiefs, and next by the attraction of

legends that harmonised with the needs of a dark, confused, and

terror-stricken time; that the many barbarous and absurd articles of

belief incorporated in the Christian profession by the sophists of the

East, received from time to time humane modification in the hands of the

wiser churchmen of the West, whose practical judgment was perpetually

softening down the crude, savage, unilluminated doctrines which had

naturally sprung up in the dismal age when the Catholic system acquired

substance and shape. A just recognition of all these things is only

easy to one whose expectations from humanity are moderate, who perceives

how tardy and difficult is the accomplishment of each smallest step in

the long process, and how helpful are even the simplest beliefs of rude

times in transforming men from vagrant animals into beings with a

consciousness of fixed common relations towards some object of common

worship, and so planting the first germs of social consolidation and

growth.

Voltaire was, from the circumstances in which he was placed, too busy

proving the purely human origin of Catholicism to have a mind free to

examine how much, if we suppose it to be of purely human origin, it has

done for those who accepted it. Perhaps we ought rather to praise than

blame him for abstaining from planting himself at the historic point of

view, before settling the previous question whether the historic point

of view is permitted in considering the religious movements of Europe.

Until Voltaire and others had divested the current religion of its

supernatural pretensions, it was impossible for any thinker, who

declines to try to take the second step before he has already taken the

first, to survey the operations of such a religion as a merely secular

force. This surely is a field of thought where no serious inquirer could

content himself with a mere working hypothesis. If the supernatural

claims of Catholicism are well founded, then the historic method of

treating it is either a frivolous diversion or else a grave and

mischievous heresy. The issue being of this moment, everybody who

studies the philosophy of history with effect must have made up his mind

in one way or the other. Voltaire had made up his mind very definitely,

and the conclusion to which, for adequate or inadequate reasons, he came

in this matter was one of the most influential agencies in preparing

men’s minds for the construction and general reception of a sounder

historical philosophy than was within his own reach. That he did not see

the deduction from his work is a limitation of vision that he shares

with most of the men to whom it has fallen to overthrow old sytems, and

clear the ground on which the next generation has raised new.

II.

Having said thus much on the general causes and conditions of Voltaire’s

attack, we may next briefly examine his method. A brief examination

suffices, because, like all his contemporaries, he was so very

imperfectly acquainted with the principles of scientific criticism, and

because his weapons, though sharp and deadly enough for their purpose,

are now likely to become more and more thoroughly antiquated. In

criticism he was, as has often been remarked, the direct descendant of

Bayle. That is, his instruments were purely literary and dialectical. He

examined the various sacred narratives as if he had been reviewing a

contemporary historian. He delights in the minute cavils of literary

pyrrhonism, and rejoices in the artifice of imposing the significance of

the letter, where his adversaries strove for interpretation of the

spirit. As if, for instance, anything could be more childish than to

attack baptism by asking whether Christianity consists in throwing water

on the head, with a little salt in it.[201] He is perfectly content with

the exposure of a fallacy in words, without seeking to expose the root

fallacy of idea. Nothing short of the blindest partisanship can pretend

to find in this a proper or adequate method. The utmost that can be

said, and no just historian ought to forget to say it, is that it was

not more improper nor inadequate than the orthodox method of defence.

Bayle’s commentary on the words, ‘Compel them to come in,’ would not

satisfy the modern requirements of scriptural exegesis, but it was quite

good enough to confound those who contended that the text was a direct

warrant and injunction from heaven for the bitterest persecution on

earth. But the unfair parry of unfair thrust, extenuate it as we may,

count it inevitable as we may, even reckoning up such advantages from it

as we can, and in the present case they were enormous, can never be any

pattern or masterpiece of retort; and it is folly to allow admiration

for the social merit of Voltaire’s end to blind us to the logical

demerit of his means. It is deliberately to throw away the advantage of

our distance from the contest, and to sell for a momentary

self-indulgence in the spirit of party the birthright of a free and

equitable historic vision. Let men not fail to do justice to the gains

of humanity won by the emancipation of the eighteenth century; but we

shall be worse off than if they had never been transmitted, if they are

allowed to bind us to approve of every detail of the many movements by

which the final triumph was obtained.

The key to his method of attack is given us in a sentence in one of his

letters to D’Alembert. ‘It is never by means of metaphysics,’ he says,

‘that you will succeed in delivering men from error; you must prove the

truth by facts.’[202] In other words, the sublime abstract reasoning of

a Spinoza will do far less to dispel the narrow ideas, unfounded

beliefs, and false restrictive conceptions which cripple the human

intelligence so long as it is in bondage to a theological system, than a

direct disproval of the alleged facts on which the system professes to

rest. It is only by dealing immediately with these that you can make the

repulse of error a real question, substantially interesting to ordinary

men. Always remembering that Voltaire’s intelligence was practical

rather than speculative, and, besides this, that from the time when he

commenced his attack in earnest the object which he had at heart was the

overthrow of a crushing practical institution, we may agree that in such

a humour and with such a purpose the most effective way of harassing so

active and pestilent a foe was to carry the war into the enemy’s

quarters, and to use those kinds of arguments which the greatest number

of men would be likely to find cogent. We may complain that Voltaire

never rises from the ground into the region of the higher facts of

religion; and this is quite true. It would have been controversially

futile if he had done so. There was no audience in those times for the

discussion of the higher facts; and the reason of this was that the

spiritual instructors and champions themselves thrust into the front

place legends, miracles, and the whole of the peculiarly vulgar part of

the theological apparatus, which it would have been as absurd to

controvert metaphysically, as it would be to try to elevate a Gold-coast

negro from his fetish worship by the transcendental parts of Plato.

It nearly always happens that the defenders of a decaying system, when

they find themselves surrounded by the wholly uncongenial atmosphere of

rationalistic method, fall back, not on the noblest, but on the

ignoblest parts of their system. Distressed by the light, they shrink

hurriedly into darkest recesses of the familiar caves, partly because

they have a sense of especial security in a region that they know so

well, and partly because they have misgivings lest the surrender of

articles or practices in which they only half believe, should by too

stringent process of logical compulsion lead to the destruction of

others in which they believe with all their hearts. Such tactics may or

may not be politic, but we can at least be quite certain that they tend

neither to elevation of religion, nor discovery of truth, nor profit and

sincerity of discussion. If a set of doctrines be attacked from many

quarters in an unworthy manner, and taken at their worst instead of at

their best, we may be quite sure that this is as much due to the

defenders as to the assailants. It was not Voltaire’s fault that the

controversy turned on issues which a more modern opponent would not care

to dispute. He is constantly flippant and trivial, and constantly

manifests gross irreverence, but it was the writers whom he was

combating, writers like Sanchez or the stercorists, who had opened

frivolous and unbecoming questions that could hardly be exposed with

gravity. He was making war on an institution, and it was not his concern

to fight on ground which his adversary had never thought, and was too

blind and demoralised to be able to think, of taking up. It was not his

fault that the upholders of the creed he attacked, made a stand upon the

letter of sacred documents, upon prophecy and miracle and special

intervention, upon the virtues of relics and the liquefaction of the

blood of Saint Januarius. The same wise man who forbade us to answer a

fool according to his folly, also enjoined upon us to answer a fool

according to his folly, and the moral commentator agrees that each

prescription is as sage as its contradictory.

If truth means anything, it was worth while to put to rout the

distortions of truth with which the church lowered the understanding of

its votaries. If truth means anything, then it was worth while to reply

to the allegation that the history of the Christian church is a long

witness of the goodness of heaven and the ever-present guidance of its

heavenly founder, by a record of the actual facts; of the simplicity,

equality, absence of multiplied rites, orders, and dogmas, among the

primitive members of the congregation, and of the radical differences

between the use of apostolic times and of times since; of the incurable

want of authority for all those tales of demons being cast out, pious

inscriptions in letters of gold found graven on the hearts of martyrs,

and the rest, which grow rare in proportion as we draw nearer to the

times when the evidence for them would have been preserved; of the

infamous character of many Christian heroes, from Constantine downwards,

and of the promptitude with which the Christians, as soon as ever they

had power, dyed their hands in the blood of their persecutors; of the

stupefying circumstances that after a revelation was made to the human

race by no less a prodigy than the incarnation of supreme power in a

mortal body, and the miraculous maintenance of this event and its

significance in the tradition, doctrine, discipline of the Catholic

church, yet the whole of Asia, the whole of Africa, all the possessions

of the English and Dutch in America, all the uncivilised Indian tribes,

all the southern lands, amounting to one-fifth part of the globe still

remain in the clutches of the demon, to verify that holy saying of many

being called but few chosen.[203]

It may be said that this kind of argument really proves nothing at all

about the supernatural origin or character of the Christian revelation,

for which you must seek the responses not of ecclesiastical history but

of the human heart. And that may be a fair thing to say, but then this

contention of the new revelation being only a message to the heart has

only been heard since Voltaire thrust aside the very different

contention of his day. Those various beliefs were universally accepted

about the progress of the church, which were true in no sense whatever,

literal or spiritual, mystical or historical. People accepted traditions

and records, sacred and profane, as literal, accurate, categorical

declarations and descriptions of a long series of things done and

suffered. Moreover, the modern argument in favour of the supernatural

origin of the Christian religion, drawn from its suitableness to our

needs and its divine response to our aspirations, must be admitted by

every candid person resorting to it to be of exactly equal force in the

mouth of a Mahometan or a fire-worshipper or an astrolater. If you apply

a subjective test of this kind, it must be as good for the sincere and

satisfied votaries of one creed, as it is for those of any other. The

needs and aspirations of the Mahometan would not be satisfied by

fetishism or polytheism, nor those of the developed polytheist by

totem-worship. It would be ridiculous for so small a minority of the

race as the professors of Christianity to assume that their aspirations

are the absolute measure of those of humanity in every stage. The

argument can never carry us beyond the relativity of religious truth.

Now the French apologist a hundred years ago dealt in the most absolute

possible matter. Christianity to him meant a set of very concrete ideas

of all sorts; any one who accepted them in the concrete and literal form

prescribed by the church would share infinite bliss, and any one who

rejected them, whether deliberately or from never having been so happy

as to hear of them, would be infinitely tormented. If this theory be

right, then Voltaire must naturally be abhorred by all persons who hold

it, as a perverse and mischievous hinderer of light. If it be wrong, and

we must observe that from its terms this is not one of the marvellously

multiplying beliefs of which we hear that they may be half wrong and

half right, then Voltaire may take rank with other useful expellers of

popular error. Everybody must admit how imperfect is all such treatment

of popular error; how little rich, how little comprehensive, how little

full. Yet the surgeon who has couched his patient’s cataract has surely

done a service, even if he do not straightway carry him to enjoy the

restored faculty on some high summit of far and noble prospect.

Voltaire’s attack was essentially the attack of the English deists, as

indeed he is always willing enough to admit, pursued with far less

gravity and honest search for truth, but, it is hardly necessary to say,

with far more adroitness, rapidity, and grace of manner than any of

them, even than Bolingbroke. As we have seen, he insisted on throwing

himself upon the facts in the records that are least easily reconciled

with a general sense of probability and evidence, as gradually developed

in men by experience. He placed the various incidents of the Bible, the

interpretation of them by the church, the statement of doctrine, the

characters of prominent actors, in the full light of common experience

and of the maxims which experience has made second nature. ‘I always

speak humanly,’ he says mockingly, ‘I always put myself in the place of

a man who, having never heard tell either of Jews or Christians, should

read these books for the first time, and not being illuminated by grace,

should be so unhappy as to trust unaided reason in the matter, until he

should be enlightened from on high.’[204]

It is superfluous to detail the treatment to which he subjected such

mysteries of the faith as the inheritance of the curse of sin by all

following generations from the first fall of man; the appearance from

time to time, among an obscure oriental tribe, of prophets who foretold

the coming of a divine deliverer, who should wash away that fatal stain

by sacrificial expiation; the choice of this specially cruel,

treacherous, stubborn, and rebellious tribe, to be the favoured people

of a deity of spotless mercy and truth; the advent of the deliverer in

circumstances of extraordinary meanness and obscurity among a generation

that greeted his pretensions with incredulity, and finally caused him to

be put to death with ignominy, in spite of his appeal to the prophets

and to the many signs and wonders which he wrought among them; the

rising of this deliverer from the dead; the ascription to him in the

course of the next three or four centuries of claims which he never made

in person, and of propositions which he never advanced while he walked

on the earth, yet which must now be accepted by every one who would

after death escape a pitiless torment without end; the truly miraculous

preservation amid a fiery swarm of heresies, intricate, minute, subtle,

barely intelligible, but very soul-destroying, of that little fragile

thread of pure belief which can alone guide each spirit in the divinely

appointed path. Exposed to the light, which they were never meant to

endure, of ordinary principles of evidence founded on ordinary

experience, the immortal legends, the prophecies, the miracles, the

mysteries, on which the spiritual faith of Europe had hung for so many

generations, seemed to shrivel up in unlovely dissolution. The

authenticity of the texts on which the salvation of man depends, the

contradictions and inconsistencies of the documents, the incompatibility

between many acts and motives expressly approved by the holiest persons,

and the justice and mercy which are supposed to sit enthroned on high in

the bosoms, the forced constructions of prophecies and their

stultifying futility of fulfilment, the extraordinary frivolousness of

some of the occasions on which the divine power of thaumaturgy was

deliberately and solemnly exerted,—these were among the points at which

the messenger of Satan at Ferney was permitted sorely to buffet the

church. What is the date of the Apostles’ Creed? What of the so-called

Athanasian Creed? How were the seven sacraments instituted one after

another? What was the difference between the synaxis and the mass? And

so forth through many hundreds of pages.

Along with rationalistic questions in scriptural and ecclesiastical

history, are many more as to doctrine, and the assumption on which a

doctrine rests; questions as to the trinity, as to redemption by the

shedding of innocent blood, as to the daily miracle of

transubstantiation, as to the resurrection of the body, as to the

existence of an entity called soul independently of that matter which,

apart from miracle, seems an inseparable condition of its manifestation.

His arguments on all these subjects contain a strange mixture of shallow

mockery and just objection. The questions which he suggests for the

doctors as to the resurrection of the body may serve for an example.

Among them are these:

‘A Breton soldier goes to Canada. It happens by a not uncommon chance

that he falls short of food; he is forced to eat a piece of an Iroquois

whom he has killed over night. The Iroquois had fed on Jesuits for two

or three months, a great part of his body had thus become Jesuit. So

there is the body of the soldier with Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he

had eaten before, entering into it. How then will each resume exactly

what belongs to him?’ ‘In order to come to life again, to be the same

person you were, you must have a lively and present recollection; it is

memory that makes your identity. Having lost memory, how are you to be

the same man?’ Again, ‘considering that only certain material elements

are proper for the composition of the human body, where is earth enough

to be found to remake all the bodies needed for so many hundreds of

generations? And supposing that by a prodigious miracle the whole human

race could be resuscitated in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where are all

the spirits meanwhile?’[205]

Another very favourite mode of approaching the beliefs, incidents, and

personages of Jewish and Christian history was to show that they had

counterparts in some pagan fables or systems, in the books of Chinese

philosophers or Brahminical sages. The inference from this identity or

correspondence between some Judaical practices and myths, and the

practices and myths of Arabians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hindoos, was

that they were in all cases equally the artificial creations of

impostors preying on the credu-lity of men, ‘the first prophet or

diviner having been the first rogue who met the first fool.’ It is

curious to observe how the modern argument from constantly extending

discoveries in comparative mythology tends to the demolition of the

special pretensions of Judaical myths of all sorts, by the very opposite

inference to that on which the Voltairean school rested. Voltaire urged

that as these myths resembled one another in this and that important

feature, therefore they were all equally spurious, false, and absurd.

The modern, on the contrary, would hold them all equally genuine,

equally free from the taint of imposture in priest or people, and

equally faithful representations of the mental states which produced and

accepted them. The weakening of the particular sanctity and objective

reality of any one form of these common primitive ways of thinking about

the action of non-human agents would be just as strong, whether we take

the new or the old view of the generation of myths, but the difference

of the effect of the two views upon the justice and fertility of

historic spirit is immeasurable.

There is no sign, however, that Voltaire was ever seriously conscious of

the importance of a right consideration of the mental conditions of

primitive peoples. This study had been commenced in his own time by De

Brosses, the inventor of the term fetishism, and pronounced by competent

modern authorities to have been a powerful and original thinker upon the

facts of the infancy of civilisation.[206] Yet Voltaire treated the

speculations of this industrious inquirer with the same ignorant

contempt and scorn that the theological enemies of geology were once

accustomed to bestow on men who chipped bits of rock and cherished

fossils.[207] Oddly enough, Voltaire’s carelessness and want of thought

on these matters left him with that very theory of the nature of the

development of cultivation, on which the theological school insists to

this day as against the scientific ethnologists. The question is whether

the earliest men were savages, or partially civilised; in other words,

whether civilisation has consisted in a certain uniform progression from

a state a little above the brutes, or whether the savage is not a being

who has degenerated from a partial degree of civilisation. The

progression theory was no doubt in a general way a characteristic

doctrine of the men of the eighteenth century, for which De Maistre, an

ardent and most ingenious advocate of the degeneration theory, reviled

them with his usual heartiness. Yet his eagerness to depress revelation

by exalting natural theology led Voltaire to the essentially theological

position that the earliest men had a clear and lofty idea of a Supreme

Being, and a ready appreciation of justice and charity in their

relations with one another, until the vile ambition of priestly and

prophetic impostors succeeded in setting upon their necks the yoke of

systems which corrupted the heart and conscience, and sophisticated a

pure and simple faith.

He did not hold that men were conscious of the one God as they were

conscious of light, or that they had perceptions of such a being, as

they had perceptions of the ground they tilled. The idea was derived by

process of natural logic from the contemplation of astonishing natural

effects, of harvest and dearth, of fair days and tempests, of

benefactions and scourges. They saw all these things, and felt the work

of a master.[208] Just as in each community there were men who by the

force of their reason found out that triangles with the same base and of

the same height are equal, and others who in sowing and reaping and

tending their flocks perceived that the sun and moon returned pretty

nearly to the point from which they had started, and that they never

travelled beyond a certain limit to north or south, so there was a third

man who considered that men, animals, stars could not have made

themselves, and who saw that therefore a Supreme Being must exist; while

a fourth, struck by the wrongs that men inflicted on one another,

concluded that if there exists a being who made the stars, the earth,

and men, such a being must confer favour on the virtuous, and

punishments on the wicked. This idea, Voltaire declares, is so natural

and so good that it was most readily embraced.[209] The various forms of

revelations were only so many corruptions of that simple, serviceable,

and self-proving monotheism, and so were the conceptions of polytheism.

He had no notion that monotheism is a later development of the

theological spirit than polytheism. Unable to deny that the Greeks and

Romans, about whom he knew so little and talked so much, had plurality

of gods, he drew a distinction between one Supreme Being and all the

rest, and contended that you may search all their records in vain for a

single fact or a single word to counterbalance the many passages and

monuments which attest their belief of the sovereignty of the one deity

and his superiority over all the rest.[210] We do not know whether this

was a fortuitous kind of growth in his own mind, or whether it was a

scrap of recollection from the painstaking pages in which Cudworth had

worked at the establishment of that explanation of polytheism. Voltaire

too often writes on these weighty subjects, as if trusting to a memory

that snatched effectively at plausible theories, while losing much of

their evidence and all their deeper bearings.

It would be not a little extraordinary, if we did not constantly

remember that Voltaire’s strength did not lie in speculation or

systematic thought, that he saw none of the objections to this account

of things, and that he was content with so limited an observation of the

facts. If De Brosses had magnanimously suffered himself to be cheated in

the transaction of the fourteen cords of wood, Voltaire would perhaps

have read his book candidly, and if he had read it otherwise than with a

foregone resolution to despise it, he would have come upon a number of

circumstances entirely fatal to his smooth theory that many gods are

always subordinate to the one, because he would have had to consider

those states of the human mind in which there are no spiritual gods at

all, but in which every object whatever is invested with volition and

power. In one place he shows something like a recognition of the true

nature of the process. ‘I have always been persuaded,’ he says in a

letter to Mairan, ‘that the phenomena of the heavens have been in the

main the source of the old fables. Thunder was heard on the inaccessible

summit of a mountain; therefore there must be gods dwelling on the

mountain, and launching the thunder. The sun seems to speed from east to

west, therefore he has fine coursers. The rain does not touch the head

of one who sees a rainbow, so the rainbow is a token that there will

never again be a deluge.’[211] But then Voltaire was no systematic

thinker, and thus there was no security that any given right idea which

came into his mind would either remain present to him, or would be

followed up and placed along with other ideas in a scientific order.

Apart from this, however, it is extraordinary that Voltaire’s extreme

acuteness did not suggest to him the question, how it was that the

artless and clear belief in one God became more and more obscured by the

growing multitude of other gods, just in proportion as the primitive

tribes became more civilised in all the arts of life. If the nomad

progenitors of the Greeks had only one god, how was it that, as

knowledge, social feeling, love of beauty, and all the other ennobling

parts of man became more fully developed, the power of superstition

waxed greater, and temples and images were multiplied!

Again, the theologist might, consistently with his deliberate principle

of resort to the miraculous, contend that this first conception of a

single supreme power, in the fact of the existence of which he is

entirely at one with Voltaire, was directly implanted by a supernatural

force. But Voltaire, debarred from such an explanation as this, was

driven silently to assume and imply the truly incredible position that

the rudest savages, being what we know them, urgently occupied in the

struggle for means of subsistence, leading lives purely animal,

possessed of no vocabulary for any abstract idea, should yet by one leap

of natural logic have risen to one of the very highest pinnacles of

speculation, and both felt and expressed the idea of cause in the most

general and comprehensive of all its forms. Surely this assumption,

measured by any of those standards of experience or probability to which

he professed to appeal, was as much of a miracle as those which he so

decisively repudiated.

In one of his letters Voltaire declared that Locke was the only

reasonable metaphysician that he knew, and that next to him he placed

Hume.[212] Did he ever read, we may wonder, that masterly essay on the

Natural History of Religion, where Hume not only combats with his usual

vigour and effectiveness the idea of the belief in one omniscient,

omnipotent, and omnipresent spirit being the primary religion of men,

and shows that polytheism precedes monotheism, but also traces the

origin of all religion to its rudiment, in that ‘universal tendency

among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to

every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted,

and of which they are intimately conscious?’[213] The greater the

knowledge we acquire of the spiritual rudiments of primitive people, the

more certainly is it established that the idea of theism as the earliest

and most elementary belief, which Voltaire had picked up from

Bolingbroke and Pope, is untenable, and that Hume has been more and more

fully warranted in saying that the only point of theology on which the

consent of mankind is nearly universal is that ‘there is an invisible,

intelligent power in the world, but whether this power be supreme or

subordinate, whether confined to one being or distributed among several,

what attributes, qualities, connections, or principles of action, ought

to be ascribed to these beings, concerning all these points there is the

widest difference in the popular systems of theology.’[214] This might

be placing natural theology very low, but Hume at any rate placed it

where he did and described it as he did, because he had knowledge enough

of the condition of various nations in various parts of their history,

and was sufficiently penetrated with a cautious and scientific spirit,

to abstain from the unsupported and purely metaphysical conjectures of

men like Voltaire and Rousseau. Well might the keen-eyed De Maistre

describe him from the Catholic point of view as the most dangerous and

the guiltiest of all those pestilent writers,—the one who employed most

talent with most coolness to do most mischief.[215]

If Voltaire had studied Hume, moreover, he might have learnt how futile

and inappropriate it is in the long run to examine a religion otherwise

than in its most fundamental and comprehensive general ideas, and how

narrow and superficial would every philosophic appreciation ultimately

find what he called refutation by facts. For his own immediate purpose,

which was to cover the church and its creed with ridicule, the method of

collecting all the ludicrous, immoral, and inconsistent circumstances in

the Scriptures and their current interpretation, was, as we have already

said, a weapon potent enough. Voltaire, however, not only did not use,

he never understood nor perceived, the fact that a religion rests for

its final base on a certain small number of ideas, or that it is only by

touching these, by loosening the firmness of their hold, by revealing

their want of coherency and consistency with other accepted ideas, that

we can expect to shake the superstructure. For example, if only the

official exponents of religion had not been so firmly bent on making

the feeblest of all their ramparts into their very citadel, it would

have been a very small thing to urge the truly singular quality of such

miracles as those of the water made wine at Cana, of the cursing of the

barren fig-tree, of the unfortunate swine who rushed violently down a

steep place and were choked. These were legends that from the right

point of view of religion were not worth defending, any more than from

the right point of view of truth they were worth attacking. The details

of the use of a supernaturally conferred power may best be let alone,

until the probability of the existence and bestowal of such power has

been discussed and decided. The important issue and matter of vital

concern turned upon the general idea of the miraculous; yet this was

what Voltaire, perhaps from an instinctive consciousness of the little

capacity he possessed for genuine speculation, postponed to the really

secondary purpose of disparaging particular cases of miraculous

performance.

We are now touching what, before Hume, was the central defect of the

eighteenth-century attack, judged philosophically rather than

practically. The movement was a reaction against a certain set of ideas

which had been incorporated in the Christian system, as that system was

elaborated by the oriental sophisters. Yet the exact conflict between

the old ideas and the new was never conceived, much less was it

expressed, in clear comprehensive formulas. Consequently the most

general terms for the debate were neither sought nor found, and hence

the oppressive narrowness, the stifling want of free air, throughout the

controversy. The truth or falsehood which it is good for us to discover

in connection with a religion resides not in detail, but in the largest

general ideas of the subject. These draw all else along with them. Let

us take an illustration from a characteristic of the anti-christian

attack which has already been mentioned. The Voltairean school, as we

have before observed,[216] habitually derided the sacred importance

attached by the church in all ages, from Saint Paul downwards, to the

practice of continence. But there is no sign, so far as the present

writer’s knowledge goes, that they ever were near perceiving the origin

of that superstition lying deep down for so many centuries in the human

mind. The sanctity of continence was only one product of the old

far-spreading conviction of all the evil and unholiness essentially

inherent in matter. This conviction, which has itself a history and

genesis well worth tracing, probably accounts for more of the peculiar

manifestations contained in Christianity than any one principle of

belief besides. From this metaphysical idea sprang the whole theory of

asceticism; it had much to do indirectly with the first establishment of

the doctrine of the divinity of Christ; it entered into the triumph of

indispensable grace.[217] The speculative origin of practices and

sentiments which the heads of the western church valued, modified, and

sagaciously used for ecclesiastical or political reasons, ought never to

be lost sight of, because their duration has depended on the

circumstance of the original speculative idea remaining deeply sunk,

though not often put into articulate form, in the minds of the faithful,

and of all others whom these practices and sentiments have influenced.

One key to the central movement of the eighteenth century is the

dispersion of this association of evil and corruption from matter. There

was energetic and triumphant progress in the discovery of the laws of

matter, in their most stupendous, overwhelming, and majestic order.

There was a steady tendency to resolve mental manifestations into

functions of matter. There was a general inclination to forget those

depressing facts connected with the decay and dissolution of matter,

which, in the dismal times when the church was founded, had been thrust

into a prominence so humiliating to human dignity. The general movement

was carried too far by extreme spirits, but on the whole it was a

salutary and much-needed protest against the limitation of knowledge

within airy cloudlands where no true knowledge was to be reached, and of

emotion within transcendental aspirations where the deep reality of

human relations faded into dim distance.

It is only when controversy is conducted with reference to ground ideas

of this kind, that the parties to it can be sure of being on the same

plane, and, if they are not on the same plane, one of the least

mischiefs is that their arguments fly over one another’s heads.

Voltaire failed, partly from want of historic knowledge, partly from

insufficient depth of nature, to see what these ground ideas were,

against which he was fighting. Thus, to take another instance, he failed

to see that the belief in the exertion of supernatural power, even on

occasions which struck him as so frivolous, and in a manner undoubtedly

incompatible with justice, was merely an incidental result of a

profoundly rooted idea of the closeness, constancy, and mixed holiness

and majesty, of the relations between man and an awful being other than

man, endowed with powers denied to us, and animated by motives

inscrutable to us. He chose, if we are not wrong in using a term that

may imply much conscious deliberation, to identify his own conception of

deity with the conception of deity in the first four centuries of the

Christian era, simply because the object of each was called by a common

name. He found that the actions attributed to the Supreme Being whom the

church revered, were unworthy of a personage endowed with the qualities

which he ascribed to a supreme power, in his own version of that

culminating conception. He was thus never on the same plane of thought

or argument, but he never was near finding this out. The God whom he

conceived was incapable, from the very nature attributed to him by his

worshippers, of the various transactions, lofty and mean, sublime and

puerile, described in the documents on which Catholicism relied, and

the tradition by which it corroborated and interpreted them. The ground

idea of the belief in the miraculous was an extremely anthropomorphic

notion of a divinity, possessed of complete power, but using it in

obedience to motives which finite understandings cannot pretend to

fathom or measure. Such a notion was the natural growth of the human

mind, amid such a set of circumstances as attended the development and

establishment of Christianity. Men sat in darkness, forlorn and without

hope, and it is not hard for us to imagine the exultation with which

some greater spirit would produce, and all others would embrace, the

idea of this misery and darkness being no more than an outer accident,

the mysterious and incomprehensible dispensation of a divine being, ever

alive to the destinies of men, but holding them in the hollow of an

unseen hand, and guiding them in ways that are not as our ways; ever

remote from corporeal vision, but operating at a multitude of points on

the spirit of each man through grace, and finally, by a consummating

miracle repeated daily some thousands of times, severing this spirit

from the probation of flesh, and prolonging its existence independently

of the body through all eternity in modes of being, none the less real

for being impossible to conceive. To Voltaire this was unspeakable

foolishness. The prodigies of grace, of the resurrection of the body, of

the incarnation of divinity, were inconsistent with the qualities which

he imputed to the creator of the universe, and hence he contented

himself with mocking at them; the real state of the case was simply that

a number of influences had drawn men aside from that conception of the

creator, with which such prodigies were not inconsistent, but were on

the contrary logically and inseparably associated.

This failure to rise to the highest ideas involved in the great debate

explains, along with much besides, two striking facts connected with it.

It explains the intense acerbity of the conflict, and the flaming depth

of the chasm which divided and divides the two camps in France. For the

best natures are most violently irritated and outraged by mocking and

satiric attack upon the minor details, the accidents, the outside of the

objects of faith, when they would have been affected in a very different

way by a contrast between the loftiest parts of their own belief and the

loftiest parts of some other belief. Many persons who would listen to a

grave attack on the consistency, reasonableness, and elevation of the

currently ascribed attributes of the godhead, with something of the

respect due to the profound solemnity of the subject, would turn with

deaf and implacable resentment upon one who should make merry over the

swine of Gadara.

The same circumstance, secondly, explains the absence of permanent

quality about all that Voltaire wrote upon religion. For instance, men

who sympathise with him in his aims, and even for their sake forgive him

his method, who have long ago struck the tents under which they once

found shelter in the lands of belief, to whom Catholicism has become as

extinct a thing as Mahometanism, even they will turn with better chance

of edification to the great masters and teachers of the old faith, than

to the fiery precursor of the new. And why, if not for the reason that

while he dealt mainly with the lower religious ideas, or with the higher

ideas in their lowest forms, they put these into the second place, and

move with an inspiring exultation amid the loftiest and most general

conceptions that fine imagination and a soaring reason could discover

among the spiritual treasures of their religion. They turned to the

diviner mind, and exercised themselves with the weightiest and most

universal circumstances of the destiny of mankind. This is what makes

their thought and eloquence of perpetual worth, because the

circumstances with which they deal are perpetually present, and the

elements of life and character to which they appeal perpetually

operative. The awful law of death, the impenetrable secret of the first

cause, the fierce play of passion and universal distribution of pain,

the momentariness of guilt and eternity of remorse, the anguish of

bereavement that chokes and rends, the hopeless inner desolation which

is the unbroken lot of myriads of the forlorn of the earth,—these

ghostly things ever laying siege to the soul were known to a Bossuet or

a Pascal, and resolved by a series of ideas about the unknowable power

and the government of the world, which are no longer the mighty weapons

of exorcism they once were, but they are at any rate of due magnitude

and proportion, sublime, solemn, never unworthy. We touch the hands of

those who have walked with the most high, and they tell us many moving

wonders; we look on faces that have shone in rays from the heaven of

noble thoughts; we hear solemn and melodious words from men who received

answers from oracles that to us are very mute, but the memory of whose

power is still upon us. Hence the work of these glowing mortals lives

even for those to whom their faith is dead, while the words that

Voltaire wrote on religion are lifeless as the Infamous which they so

meritoriously slew. As we have said, he never knew the deeper things of

Catholicism. This is what he wrote about the immortal Dante: ‘Everybody

with a spark of good sense ought to blush at that monstrous assemblage

in hell of Dante and Virgil, of Saint Peter and Madonna Beatrice. There

are to be found among us, in the eighteenth century, people who force

themselves to admire feats of imagination as stupidly extravagant and as

barbarous as this; they have the brutality to oppose them to the

masterpieces of genius, wisdom, and eloquence, that we have in our

language. _O tempora, O judicium!_’[218] To which prodigy of criticism

we can only exclaim with the echo, _O tempora, O judicium!_

III.

Let us see shortly what was Voltaire’s own solution of those facts of

life with which religion has to deal. The Catholic solution we know, and

can definitely analyse and describe; but the vagueness of Voltairean

deism defies any attempt at detailed examination. We can perceive a

supernatural existence, endowed with indefinable attributes, which are

fixed subjectively in the individual consciousness of each believer, and

which therefore can never be set forth in a scheme of general

acceptance. The Voltairean deist—and such persons exist in ample numbers

to this day—hardly ever takes the trouble to reconcile with one another

the various attributes which he imputes at various times to some great

master power of the universe. There is scarcely one of these attributes

to which, when it comes to be definitely described, he does not

encounter affronting contradiction in the real occurrences that arise

from time to time to search and try all our theories, deistical, or

other. The phenomena of moral and physical evil on the earth, and the

arrival of disasters which make no discrimination between their victims,

are constantly dealing sore blows to the conceptions which the deist

loves to erect in moments of optimistic expansion, of the clemency,

justice, and illimitable power of a being who governs the universe, and

is a something outside and independent of it. These optimist

conceptions, vague, unverified, free of definite relations with any

moral or social system, and furnishing no principle of active human

association as the Catholic idea of deity had done, constitute the

favourite religion or religiosity of those classes in all modern

countries, which have found the Voltairean kind of objection to the

Christian revelation insuperable, and which are so fortunate as to enjoy

a full measure of material prosperity. To these classes the black side

of life is strange and a matter of hearsay; and hence the awkwardness of

reconciling their complacent theory with the horror of facts is never

forced upon them. In their own happiness they love to superadd the

luxury of thankfulness to the bounty of a being to whom they owe all,

and to swell the tide of their own emotions by meditation on his

infinite and unspeakable perfections. Proof they require none, beyond

the loveliness and variety of external nature, the innocence and delight

of all young creatures, the order of the seasons bearing us their

copious fruit, the vivid intelligence and serviceable power of man, who

is the divinely appointed recipient of all these multitudinous favours.

Hence in proportion as this sort of deism stirs the soul of a man, the

more closely are his inmost thoughts reserved for contemplation of the

relations between the Supreme Being and his own individuality. It is a

creed which is specially adapted for, and has been generally seized by,

those with whom the world has gone very well, owing to their own

laudable exertion, and who are inclined to believe that the existing

ordering of society is fundamentally the best possible. It is the

superlative decoration of optimism.

The mass of men, those who dwell in dens and whose lives are bitter,

have never, in spite even of Rousseau’s teaching, accepted deism. An

opportunity for trying the experiment had occurred in the fourth

century, and the lesson should not be forgotten. Deism had been the

prevailing opinion in religion, but, as the most instructive of all the

historians of the dissolution of the Empire observes, it was generally

felt that deism did not supply the void occasioned by the absence of the

multitude of sympathetic divinities of the pagan system. Its influence

was cold and inanimate.[219] The common people are wont to crave a

revelation, or else they find atheism a rather better synthesis than any

other. They either cling to the miraculously transmitted message with

its hopes of recompense, and its daily communication of the divine voice

in prayer or sacrament, or else they make a world which moves through

space as a black monstrous ship with no steersman. The bare deistic

idea, of a being endowed at once with sovereign power and sovereign

clemency, with might that cannot be resisted and justice that cannot be

impugned, who loves man with infinite tenderness, yet sends him no word

of comfort and gives him no way of deliverance, is too hard a thing for

those who have to endure the hardships of the brutes, but yet preserve

the intelligence of men.

Comment concevoir un Dieu, la bonté même,

Qui prodigua ses biens à ses enfans qu’il aime,

Et qui versa sur eux les maux à pleines mains?

Quel œil peut pénétrer dans ses profonds desseins?

De l’être tout parfait le mal ne pouvait naître!

Il ne vient point d’autrui puisque Dieu seul est maître:

Il existe pourtant. O tristes vérités!

O melange etonnant de contrariétés!

Un Dieu vint consoler notre race affligée;

Il visita la terre et ne l’a point changée!

Un sophiste arrogant nous dit qu’il ne l’a pu;

Il le pouvait, dit l’autre, et ne l’a point voulu;

Il le voudra, sans doute; et tandis qu’on raisonne,

Des foudres souterraines engloutissent Lisbonne,

Et de trente cités dispersent les débris,

Des bords sanglans du Tage à la mer de Cadix.[220]

A bald deism has undoubtedly been the creed of some of the purest and

most generous men that have ever trod the earth, but none the less on

that account is it in its essence a doctrine of self-complacent

individualism from which society has little to hope, and with which

there is little chance of the bulk of society ever sympathising. In

truth, one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name for a

particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a state

of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are you

going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this fair

word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and

take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and

cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear

like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with

new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought

of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of

metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our

justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a

cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that

the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but

by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of

godlike natures moving among them under figure of the most eternally

touching of human relations, a tender mother ever interceding for them,

and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be

loosened.

We have spoken of Voltairean deism, and the expression is a convenient

one to distinguish from the various forms of mystic theology, which

gloomily disclaim any pretence to be rational, the halting-place of

spirits too deeply penetrated with the rationalistic objections of

Voltaire to accept revelation, and either too timorous or too confident

to acquiesce in a neutral solution. It is unjust, however, to attribute

to Voltaire himself a perfect adherence to the deistical idea. For the

first half of his life there is no doubt that it floated in his mind,

as in so many others, in a random manner, as the true explanation of the

world. His introduction to the teaching of Newton would give a firmer

shape to such a belief. He has indeed told us that it was so. He

mentions that in the course of several interviews he had with Doctor

Samuel Clarke in 1726, this philosopher never pronounced the name of God

without a curious air of awe and self-collection, and he commemorates

the impression which the sight of this habit, and reflection upon its

significance, made upon him[221]. Still it was not a very active or

vital element of belief with him even then, but rather of the nature of

the sublimest of poetic figures.

Oui, dans le sein de Dieu, loin de ce corps mortel,

L’esprit semble écouter la voix l’Eternel[222].

Clearly this kind of expression means very little, and has no source in

the deeper seats of the writer’s feeling. A considerable number of

Voltaire’s deistical ejaculations, and on these occasions he threw into

them a measure of real unction, may be fairly traced to the

extraordinary polemical utility of an idea of spotless purity, entire

justice, inexhaustible mercy, as an engine of battle against men who in

the sacred name of this idea were the great practitioners of intolerance

and wrong.

Ignorer ton être suprême,

Grand Dieu! c’est un moindre blasphème,

Et moins digne de ton courroux

Que de te croire impitoyable,

De nos malheurs insatiable,

Jaloux, injuste comme nous.

Lorsqu’un dévot atrabilaire

Nourri de superstition,

A par cette affreuse chimère,

Corrompu sa religion,

Le voilà stupide et farouche:

Le fiel découle de sa bouche,

Le fanatisme arme son bras:

Et dans sa piété profonde

Sa rage immolerait le monde

A son Dieu, qu’il ne connaît pas.[223]

To have a conception of perfect goodness was a manifest convenience in

confronting men who were to be proved masters of badness. But when the

pressure of circumstance forced Voltaire to seek in earnest for an

explanation of the world, which he had formerly been content to take in

an easy way upon trust, then the deism, which had been barely more than

nominal at best, was transformed into a very different and far sincerer

mood. It would obviously be a gross blunder from a logical point to

confound optimism with deism, but it is clear that what shook Voltaire’s

conviction of the existence of a deity was the awakening in him of a

keener sense of the calamities that afflict the race of man. Personal

misfortunes perhaps had their share. It was after the loss of Madame du

Châtelet, and after the rude dispersion of his illusions as to

Frederick, when he barely knew whither to turn for shelter or a home,

that the optimism which he had learnt in England began to lose its hold

upon him. We must do him the justice to add that he was yet more

sensible of disasters which affected others. The horrid tide of war

which devastated Europe and America, the yet more hateful tide of

persecution for opinion which swept over France, and the cruel

maladministration of justice which disgraced her tribunals, stirred all

that was best in him to the very depths. The only non-dramatic poem of

his which has strength, sincerity, and profundity of meaning enough

firmly to arrest the reader’s attention, and stimulate both thought and

feeling, is that fine and powerful piece which he wrote on the occasion

of the great earthquake of Lisbon.[224] Here he threw into energetic and

passionately argumentative verse the same protest against the theory

that whatever is is best, which he afterwards urged in a very different

form in the ‘refined insolence’ of Candide.[225] He approaches more

nearly than a quarter of a century before he would have thought

possible, to the deep gloom of the Pascal against whose terrible

pictures he had then so warmly protested. He sees mankind imprisoned in

a circle of appalling doom, from which there is no way of escape. Unlike

Pascal, he can find no solution, and he denounces that mockery of a

solution which cries that all is well in accents stifled with

lamentation. He protests against the delusion of forcing the course of

the world’s destiny into a moral formula, that shall contain the terms

of justice and mercy in their human sense.

Aux cris demi-formés de leurs voix expirantes,

Au spectacle effrayant de leurs cendres fumantes,

Direz-vous: C’est l’effet des éternelles lois,

Qui d’un Dieu libre et bon nécessitent le choix?

Direz-vous, en voyant cet amas de victimes:

Dieu s’est vengé, leur mort est le prix de leurs crimes?

Quelle crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfans

Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglans?

Lisbonne, qui n’est plus, eut-elle plus de vices

Que Londres, que Paris, plongés dans les délices?

Lisbonne est abîmée, et l’on danse á Paris.

He equally refuses, though not in terms, to comfort himself by the

reflection that, in default of a better, the current ragged theory of

the providential government of the universe, because it may be possible,

must be true. He can find no answer, and confesses his belief that no

answer is to be found by human effort. Whatever side we take, we can

only shudder; there is nothing that we know, nothing that we have not to

fear. Nature is mute, and we interrogate her in vain; the book of

destiny is closed to our eyes.

L’homme, étranger à soi, de l’homme est ignoré.

Que suis-je? où suis-je? où vais-je? et d’où suis-je tiré?

Atomes tourmentés sur cet amas de boue,

Que la mort engloutit, et dont le sort se joue,

Mais atomes pensans, atomes dont les yeux,

Guidés par la pensée, ont mesuré les cieux,

Au sein de l’infini nous élaçons notre être,

Sans pouvoir un moment nous voir et nous connaître.

* * * * *

Le passé n’est pour nous qu’un triste souvenir;

Le présent est affreux, s’il n’est point d’avenir,

Si la nuit du tombeau détruit l’être qui pense.

He abandons Plato and rejects Epicurus. Bayle knows more than they, as,

with the balance in his hand, he teaches men to doubt; wise enough,

great enough, to be without a system.

In a note he adds to this glorification of Bayle, whom he styles the

advocate-general of the philosophers—the thinker in whose pages all

opinions are set forth, all the reasons which shake them and all which

uphold are equally investigated, while he abstains from giving any

conclusions.[226] Elsewhere he explains that when he describes reason as

having made immense progress in Germany, he does not refer to those who

openly embrace the system of Spinoza; but the good folk who have no

fixed principles on the nature of things, who do not know what is, but

know very well what is not, these are my true philosophers.[227]

It would not be difficult to find a score of passages in which the

writer assumes or declares certainty on this high matter to be

attainable, and to be entirely in one direction. His opinions

undoubtedly shifted with the veering of his moods, but on the whole

these axioms of suspense mark the central point to which they constantly

tended to return, and at which they rested longest. That dark word, Shut

thine eyes and thou shalt see, opened no road for him. The saying that

the Most High may be easily known, provided one does not press for

definition, offered no treasure of spiritual acquisition to the man who

never let go, even if he did not always accurately appreciate, Locke’s

injunction to us to be careful to define our terms. We cannot label

Voltaire either spiritualist or materialist. The success with which he

evades these two appellations is one of the best available tests of a

man’s capacity for approaching the great problems with that care and

positive judgment, which are quite as proper to them as to practical

affairs or to physical science.

Thus with reference to the other great open question, he habitually

insisted that the immortality of the soul can never possibly be

demonstrated, and that this is why it has been revealed to us by

religion,[228] which is perhaps Voltaire’s way of saying that it is no

near concern of his. Sometimes he argued from considerations of general

probability. The brutes feel and think up to a certain point, and men

have only the advantage over them of a greater combination of ideas; the

more or less makes no difference in kind. ‘Well, nobody thinks of giving

an immortal soul to a flea; why should you give one any the more to an

elephant, or a monkey, or my Champagne valet, or a village steward who

has a trifle more instinct than my valet?’[229] Again, he retorted

significantly on those who contended with a vehemence of prejudice

known in some places even to this day, that belief in the immortality of

the soul is an indispensable condition of probity; as if the first Jews

accepted that dogma, and as if there were no honest men among them, and

no instruction in virtue.[230]

In fine, then, we search Voltaire in vain for a positive creed, which

logic may hold in coherent bonds, or social philosophy accept as a

religious force. The old word about his faith must be pronounced true.

It remains a creed of negation. But still, be it always understood,

negation of darkness. And this inevitably leads in the direction of the

day. It was an indispensable step in the process of transition. Men, it

is constantly being said since the violent breaking-up of French

society, will never consent to live on no better base than articles of

denial and formulas of suspense, for are not the deepest parts of human

character moved by strong yearning for relationship with the unknowable?

It may be so, and if it be, the Voltairean movement was the great

instrument in leading, not merely a scanty group of speculative

intellects, but vast bodies, large nations, of common folk to perceive,

or dimly to conjecture, that this object of adoration which their eyes

strain after _is_ unknowable, and that there is no attainable external

correlative of their deep desire. Voltaire never went so far in the

direction of assertion as Rousseau, and he never went so far in the

direction of denial as Holbach. And, whatever we may say generally of

the horror of the world for the spirit that denies, all that was best

and most truly progressive in French society during the eighteenth

century, Turgot and Condorcet no less than Beaumarchais, showed itself

content to follow him in this middle path. His appreciation of religion

was wanting in a hundred vital things, just as some may say that

Luther’s was, but it contained the one idea which the deepest spirit of

the time prompted men to desire, the decisive repudiation of the

religious notions of the past. We must call this negative, no doubt, but

no word should frighten us away from seeing how much positive aspiration

lay underneath. When men are in the mood of France a century and a

quarter since, when all that an old civilisation has bestowed on them of

what is best and strongest, rises up against all that the same

civilisation has bequeathed to them of what is pestilent and dangerous,

they are never nice critics. They do not decline a reinvigorating

article of faith, because it is not a system, nor do they measure a

deliverer by syllogism. The smallest chink may shine like light of the

sun to prisoners long held in black and cavernous recesses.

When Bayle’s Dictionary came out, we read, so great was the avidity to

have sight of it, that long before the doors of the Mazarin library were

open, a little crowd assembled in the early morning of each day, and

there was as great a struggle for the first access to the precious book,

as for the front row at the performance of a piece for which there is a

rage.[231] This was the beginning of an immense impulse of curiosity,

eager to fill the vacuum occasioned by the slow subsidence of the old

religion, which had once covered not only faith, but science, history,

dialectic, and philosophy, all in a single synthesis. It was this

impulse which Voltaire both represented and accelerated. In these

periods of agitation, men forgive all to one who represents without

compromise or diminution their own dominant passions. Vehemence of

character counts for more than completeness of doctrine, and they crave

a battle-cry, not a dissertation. They need to have their own sentiment

aggressively presented, and their own defects of boldness or courage at

once rebuked and supplemented by a leader whose purpose can never be

mistaken, and whose words are never nipped by the frost of intellectual

misgiving. All through the century there was slowly growing up an inner

France, full of angry disgust against the past. Its germ was the crowd

eager to read Bayle. Its outcome was the night of the Fourth of August

1789, when the civil order of society was overthrown between a sunset

and a dawn. Voltaire, as we have seen, studiously abstained from any

public word upon things political, but it was he who in the long

interval between these two events held men by a watchword to which the

political decay of the country gave such meaning, that of hatred to the

old. And there was no such steadfast symbol of the old as the church,

to him and his school a lurid beacon on a monster-haunted shore.

Voltaire’s selection of the church as the object of his attacks marks an

important difference between him and the other great revolutionary

precursor. Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar was perfectly willing to accept the

cultus of Christianity, even when he had ceased to accept its dogma. He

regarded all particular religions as so many salutary institutions, all

good so long as they were the organs for a due service of God. He

actually celebrated mass with more veneration after the acquisition of

his new principles, than he had been accustomed to do when he supposed

that the mass was an occasion of personal divine presence. This kind of

teaching was clearly to perpetuate and transfix for ever the form of

religion which each country, or any given set of men in it, might

possess. It was to stereotype belief, as it is stereotyped among the

millions in the East. Whence was reform to come, whence any ray of new

light, whence a principle of growth and activity for the intelligence of

men? How on these terms is truth to win the battle at a single point?

This was the beginning of a fatal substitution of bland emotional

complacency for robust cultivation of the reason, and firm reverence for

its lessons as the highest that we can learn. Voltaire no doubt did in

practice many a time come to terms with his adversary while he was yet

on the way with him; but, disagreeable as these temporisings are to us

who live in an easier day, they never deceived any one, nor could they

ever be mistaken for the establishment of intellectual treason as a

principle, or of philosophic indifference as a climax. As has been said,

though he writes in the midst of the old régime, in the face of the

Bastille, and with the fetters of the enemy in some sort actually upon

him, he still finds a thousand means of reaching you.[232] He is always

the representative of reason, and never of sentimentalism. He was not

above superficial compromises in matters of conduct, and these it is

hard or impossible to condone; but at any rate he is free from the

deeper and more penetrating reproach of erecting hypocrisy into a

deliberate doctrine.

We do not know how far he ever seriously approached the question, so

much debated since the overthrow of the old order in France, whether a

society can exist without a religion? He says in one place that to

believe God and spirits corporeal is an old metaphysical error, but

absolutely not to believe in any god would be an error incompatible with

wise government. But even this much was said for the sake of introducing

a taunt against the orthodox, who by a strange contradiction had risen

up with fury against Bayle for believing it possible that a society of

atheists could hold together, while they insisted with just as much

violence that the empire of China was established on a basis of

atheism.[233] His natural sagacity would most likely have shown him

that this is one of the sterile problems, with which the obstructive

defender of things as they are tries to draw the soldier of improvement

away from his strongest posts. Whether a society can exist without

religion or not, at least its existence as a structure for whose

duration we can be anxious, must depend on the number of men in it who

deal honestly with their own understandings. And, further, is no man to

be counted to have a religion who, like Voltaire, left great questions

open, and put them aside, as all questions, that must from the

limitations of human faculty eternally remain open, well deserve to be

put aside? Must we ever call an unknown God by one name? Are there so

few tasks for one on earth, that he must strain all his soul to fix the

regimen of high heaven?

Voltaire, there is every reason to think, did in an informal kind of way

suppose in the bottom of his heart that there is nothing in human nature

to hinder a very advanced society from holding perfectly well together,

with all its opinions in a constant state of analysis. Whatever we may

think of it, this dream of what is possible, if the activity of human

intelligence were only sufficiently stimulated and the conditions of

social union were once so adjusted as to give it fair play,

unquestionably lies at the root of the revolutionary ideas with all

those who were first stirred by Voltaire rather than by Rousseau.

Condorcet, for instance, manifestly depends with the firmest confidence

upon that possibility being realised. It is the idea of every literary

revolutionist, as distinguished from the social or economic

revolutionist, in France at the present day. The knowledge that this was

the case, added to the sound conviction that men can never live by

analysis alone, gave its fire to De Maistre’s powerful attack, and its

immense force to Burke’s plea for what he called prejudice. But the

indispensable synthesis need never be immovably fixed, nor can it soon

again be one and single for our civilisation; for progress consists in

gradual modifications of it, as increase of knowledge and unforeseen

changes in the current of human affairs disclose imperfections in it,

and wherever progress is a law the stages of men’s advance are unequal.

Above all, it is monstrous to suppose that because a man does not accept

your synthesis, he is therefore a being without a positive creed or a

coherent body of belief capable of guiding and inspiring conduct.

There are new solutions for him, if the old are fallen dumb. If he no

longer believes death to be a stroke from the sword of God’s justice,

but the leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter, the humility of

his awe is deepened, and the tenderness of his pity made holier, that

creatures who can love so much should have their days so shut round with

a wall of darkness. The purifying anguish of remorse will be stronger,

not weaker, when he has trained himself to look upon every wrong in

thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner

spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own

guidance and advantage, less as a breach of the decrees of an unseen

tribunal, than as an ungrateful infection, weakening and corrupting the

future of his brothers. And he will be less effectually raised from

inmost prostration of soul by a doubtful subjective reconciliation, so

meanly comfortable to his own individuality, than by hearing full in the

ear the sound of the cry of humanity craving sleepless succour from her

children. That swelling consciousness of height and freedom with which

the old legends of an omnipotent divine majesty fill the breast, may

still remain; for how shall the universe ever cease to be a sovereign

wonder of overwhelming power and superhuman fixedness of law? And a man

will be already in no mean paradise, if at the hour of sunset a good

hope can fall upon him like harmonies of music, that the earth shall

still be fair, and the happiness of every feeling creature still receive

a constant augmentation, and each good cause yet find worthy defenders,

when the memory of his own poor name and personality has long been

blotted out of the brief recollection of men for ever.