Chapter V: Religion (2)

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]