hat there arose in
France on the death of Louis XIV a man with all Voltaire's peculiar
gifts of intelligence, who added to them an incessant activity in their
use, and who besides this enjoyed such length of days as to make his
intellectual powers effective to the very fullest extent possible. This
combination of physical and mental conditions so amazingly favorable to
the spread of the Voltairean ideas was a circumstance independent of the
state of the surrounding atmosphere, and was what in the phraseology of
prescientific times might well have been called providential. If
Voltaire had seen all that he saw, and yet been indolent; or if he had
been as clear-sighted and as active as he was, and yet had only lived
fifty years, instead of eighty-four, Voltairism would never have struck
root. As it was, with his genius, his industry, his longevity, and the
conditions of the time being what they were, that far-spreading movement
of destruction was inevitable.

There are more kinds of Voltaireans than one, but no one who has marched
ever so short a way out of the great camp of old ideas is directly or
indirectly out of the debt and out of the hand of the first liberator,
however little willing he may be to recognize one or the other.
Attention has been called by every writer on Voltaire to the immense
number of the editions of his works, a number probably unparalleled in
the case of any author within the same limits of time. Besides being one
of the most voluminous book-writers, he is one of the cheapest. We can
buy one of Voltaire's books for a few halfpence, and the keepers of the
cheap stalls in the cheap quarters of London and Paris will tell you
that this is not from lack of demand, but the contrary. So clearly does
that light burn for many even now, which scientifically speaking ought
to be extinct, and for many indeed is long ago extinct and superseded.
The reasons for this vitality are that Voltaire was himself thoroughly
alive when he did his work, and that the movement which that work began
is still unexhausted.

How shall we attempt to characterize this movement? The historian of the
Christian church usually opens his narrative with an account of the
depravation of human nature and the corruption of society which preceded
the new religion. The Reformation in like manner is only to be
understood after we have perceived the enormous mass of superstition,
injustice, and wilful ignorance by which the theological idea