e great oracle of the
superficial thinkers of his nation and age. He was born in 1694, and
early appeared upon the stage. He was a favorite at Versailles, and a
companion of Frederic the Great--as great an egotist as he, though his
egotism was displayed in a different way. He was an aristocrat, made
for courts, and not for the people, with whom he had no sympathy,
although the tendency of his writings was democratic. In all his
satirical sallies, he professed to respect authority. But he was never
in earnest, was sceptical, insincere, and superficial. It would not be
rendering him justice to deny that he had great genius. But his genius
was to please, to amuse a vain-glorious people, to turn every thing
into ridicule, to pull down, and substitute nothing instead. He was a
modern Lucian, and his satirical mockery destroyed reverence for God
and truth. He despised and defied the future, and the future has
rendered a verdict which can never be reversed--that he was vain,
selfish, shallow, and cold, without faith in any spiritual influence
to change the world. But he had a keen perception of what was false,
with all his superficial criticism, a perception of what is now called
_humbug_; and it cannot be denied that, in a certain sense, he had a
love of truth, but not of truth in its highest development, not of the
positive, the affirmative, the real. Negation and denial suited him
better, and suited the age in which he lived better; hence he was a
"representative man," was an exponent of his age, and led the age. He
hated the Jesuits, but chiefly because they advocated a blind
authority; and he strove to crush Christianity, because its professors
so often were a disgrace to it, while its best members were martyrs
and victims. Voltaire did not, like Helvetius, propose any new system
of philosophy, but strove to make all systems absurd. He set the ball
of Atheism in motion, and others followed in a bolder track: pushed
out, not his principles, for he had none, but his spirit, into the
extreme of mockery and negation. And such a course unsettled the
popular faith, both in religion and laws, and made men indifferent to
the future, and to their moral obligations.

[Sidenote: Rousseau.]

Quite a different man was Rousseau. He was not a mocker, or a
leveller, or a satirist, or an atheist. He resembled Voltaire only in
one respect--in egotism. He was not so learned as Voltaire, did not
write so much, was not so highly honored or