htung_, bk. xi.

If this was the light in which the book appeared to the young man who
was soon to be the centre of German literature, the brilliant veteran
who had for two generations been the centre of the literature of France
was both shocked by the audacity of the new treatise, and alarmed at the
peril in which it involved the whole Encyclopaedic brotherhood, with the
Patriarch at their head. Voltaire had no sooner read the _System of
Nature_ than he at once snatched up his ever-ready pen and plunged into
refutation.[140] At the same time he took care that the right persons
should hear what he had done. He wrote to his old patron and friend
Richelieu, that it would be a great kindness if he would let the King
know that the abused Voltaire had written an answer to the book that all
the world was talking about. I think, he says, that it is always a good
thing to uphold the doctrine of the existence of a God who punishes and
rewards; society has need of such an opinion. There is a curious
disinterestedness in the notion of Lewis the Fifteenth and Richelieu,
two of the wickedest men of their time, being anxious for the
demonstration of a _Dieu vengeur_. Voltaire at least had a very keen
sense of the meaning of a court that rewarded and punished. The author
of the _System of Nature_, he wrote to Grimm, ought to have felt that he
was undoing his friends, and making them hateful in the eyes of the king
and the court.[141] This came true in the case of the great
philosopher-king himself. Frederick of Prussia was offended by a book
which spared political superstitions as little as theological dogma, and
treated kings as boldly as it treated priests. Though keenly occupied in
watching the war then waging between Russia and Turkey, and already
revolving the partition of Poland, he found time to compose a defence of
theism. 'Tis a good sign, Voltaire said to him, when a king and a plain
man think alike: their interests are often so hostile, that when their
ideas do agree, they must certainly be right.[142]

[140] See the article _Dieu_ in the _Dict. Philosophique_.

[141] Voltaire's _Corr._, Nov. 1, 1770.

[142] July 27, 1770.

The philosophic meaning of Holbach's propositions was never really
seized by Voltaire. He is, as has been justly said, the representative
of ordinary common sense which, with all its declamations and its
appeals to the feelings, is wholly without weight or significance as
against a philo