olated on the
altar of a spurious Christianity. One hundred thousand were slain in
the Bartholomew massacre alone. Righteousness, peace, and love
were not the monster which Voltaire laboured to crush: he was most
intensely incensed against the blind and bigoted priesthood, against
the malicious and murderous servants who ate the bread of a holy
and harmless Master, against "their intolerance of light and hatred of
knowledge, their fierce yet profoundly contemptible struggles with
one another, the scandals of their casuistry, their besotted cruelty."
[273] We have been betrayed into speaking thus strongly of the
extreme lengths to which superstition will carry those who yield
themselves to its ruthless tyranny. But perhaps we have not gone far
from our subject, after all; for the innocent Iphigenia, whose doom
kindled our ire, was sacrificed to the goddess of the moon.

II. LUNAR FANCIES.

There are a few phosphorescent fancies about the moon, like _ignes
fatui_,

"Dancing in murky night o'er fen and lake,"

which we may dispose of in a section by themselves. Those of them
that are mythical are too evanescent to become full-grown myths;
and those which are religious are too volatile to remain in the
solution or salt of any bottled creed. Like the wandering lights of the
Russians, answering to our will-o'-the-wisp, they are the souls of
still-born children. There is, for example, the insubstantial and
formless but pleasing conception of the Indian Veda. In the
Ramayanam the moon is a good fairy, who in giving light in the
night assumes a benignant aspect and succours the dawn. In the
Vedic hymn, Raka, the full moon, is exhorted to sew the work with
a needle which cannot be broken. Here the moon is personified as
preparing during the night her luminous garments, one for the
evening, the other for the morning, the one lunar and of silver, the
other solar and of gold. [274] Another notion, equally airy but more
religious, has sprung up in Christian times and in Catholic countries.
It is that heathen fancy which connects the moon with the Virgin
Mary. Abundant evidence of this association in the minds of Roman
Catholics is furnished by the style of the ornaments which crowd the
continental churches. One of the most conspicuous is the sun and
moon in conjunction, precisely as they are represented on
Babylonian and Grecian coins; and the identification of the Virgin
and her Child with the moon any Roman Catholic