hat he
refused to lay up his hatred privily in his heart, and insisted on
giving his abhorrence a voice, and tempering for his just rage a fine
sword, very fatal to those who laid burdens too hard to be borne upon
the conscience and life of men. Voltaire's contemporaries felt this.
They were stirred to the quick by the sight and sound and thorough
directness of those ringing blows.

If he was often a mocker in form, he was always serious in meaning and
laborious in matter. If he was unflinching against theology, he always
paid religion respect enough to treat it as the most important of all
subjects.

The old-fashioned nomenclature puts him down among sceptics, because
those who had the official right to affix these labels could think of no
more contemptuous name, and could not suppose the most audacious soul
capable of advancing even under the leadership of Satan himself beyond a
stray doubt or so. He had perhaps as little of the sceptic in his
constitution as Bossuet or Butler, and was much less capable of becoming
one than De Maistre or Paley. This was a prime secret of his power, for
the mere critic and propounder of unanswered doubts never leads more
than a handful of men after him. Voltaire boldly put the great question,
and he boldly answered it. He asked whether the sacred records were
historically true, the Christian doctrine divinely inspired and
spiritually exhaustive, and the Christian Church a holy and beneficent
organization. He answered these questions for himself and for others
beyond possibility of misconception. The records he declared saturated
with fable and absurdity, the doctrine imperfect at its best, and a dark
and tyrannical superstition at its worst, and the Church was the
arch-curse and infamy. Say what we will of these answers, they were free
from any taint of scepticism. Our lofty new idea of rational freedom as
freedom from conviction, and of emancipation of understanding as
emancipation from the duty of settling whether important propositions
are true or false, had not dawned on Voltaire.

He had just as little part or lot in the complaisant spirit of the man
of the world, who from the depths of his mediocrity and ease presumes to
promulgate the law of progress, and as dictator to fix its speed. Who
does not know this temper of the man of the world, that worst enemy of
the world? His inexhaustible patience of abuses that only torment
others; his apologetic word for beliefs that may perh