s aim evidently being to imply that his infidels and atheists, if
they are somewhat vicious in taste, had the countenance of good
Christian example or parallel for all the lapses they show. Mr. Morley
wishes to be fair, but his atheist zeal overcomes him. This is
especially evident in his work on "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists,"
where his propagandist desire to clear the character of his hero bribes
him once and again to unconscious false dealing. In his "Voltaire," and
in his "Rousseau," Mr. Morley is so lofty in tone, expressing himself
against the moral obliquities of the men with whom he is dealing, that
often you feel the ethic atmosphere of the books to be pure and bracing,
almost beyond the standard of biblical and Christian. But in his
"Diderot and the Encyclopaedists," such fine severity is conspicuously
absent. Mr. Morley is so deeply convinced that atheism is what we all
most need just now, that when he has--not halting mere infidels, like
Voltaire and Rousseau--but good thorough-going atheists, like Diderot
and his fellows, to exhibit, he can hardly bring himself to injure their
exemplary influence with his readers, by allowing to exist any damaging
flaws in their character.

Even in Voltaire and Rousseau, but particularly in Voltaire, Mr. Morley,
though his sympathy with these writers is, as we have said, not
complete, finds far more to praise than to blame. To this eager apostle
of atheism, Voltaire was at least on the right road, although he did,
unfortunately, stop short of the goal. His influence was potent against
Christianity, and potent it certainly was not against atheism. Voltaire
might freely be lauded as on the whole a mighty and a beneficent
liberalizer of thought.

And we, we who are neither atheists nor deists--let us not deny to
Voltaire his just meed of praise. There were streaks of gold in the base
alloy of that character of his. He burned with magnanimous heat against
the hideous doctrine and practice of ecclesiastical persecution. Carlyle
says of Voltaire, that he "spent his best efforts, and as many still
think, successfully, in assaulting the Christian religion." This, true
though it be, is liable to be falsely understood. It was not against the
Christian religion, as the Christian religion really is, but rather
against the Christian religion as the Roman hierarchy misrepresented it,
that Voltaire ostensibly directed his efforts. "You are right," wrote he
to his henchman D'Alembert,