is compatible with the most
exalted piety, formed, when held in conjunction, the groundwork of a
system of irreligion. The doctrine of Bossuet, that transubstantiation
is affirmed in the Gospel, and the doctrine of Tillotson, that
transubstantiation is an absurdity, when put together, produced by
logical necessity the inferences of Voltaire.

Had the sect which was rising at Paris been a sect of mere scoffers, it
is very improbable that it would have left deep traces of its existence
in the institutions and manners of Europe. Mere negation, mere Epicurean
infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the
peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action. It inspires no
enthusiasm. It has no missionaries, no crusaders, no martyrs. If the
Patriarch of the Holy Philosophical Church had contented himself with
making jokes about Saul's asses and David's wives, and with criticising
the poetry of Ezekiel in the same narrow spirit in which he criticised
that of Shakespeare, Rome would have had little to fear. But it is due
to him and to his compeers to say that the real secret of their strength
lay in the truth which was mingled with their errors, and in the
generous enthusiasm which was hidden under their flippancy. They were
men who, with all their faults, moral and intellectual, sincerely and
earnestly desired the improvement of the condition of the human race,
whose blood boiled at the sight of cruelty and injustice, who made
manful war, with every faculty which they possessed, on what they
considered as abuses, and who on many signal occasions placed themselves
gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed. While they assailed
Christianity with a rancor and unfairness disgraceful to men who called
themselves philosophers, they yet had, in far greater measure than their
opponents, that charity towards men of all classes and races which
Christianity enjoins. Religious persecution, judicial torture, arbitrary
imprisonment, the unnecessary multiplication of capital punishments, the
delay and chicanery of tribunals, the exactions of farmers of the
revenue, slavery, the slave trade, were the constant subjects of their
lively satire and eloquent disquisitions. When an innocent man was
broken on the wheel at Toulouse, when a youth, guilty only of an
indiscretion, was beheaded at Abbeville, when a brave officer, borne
down by public injustice, was dragged, with a gag in his mouth, to die
on the Place d