t angrier
than it had ever been. D'Alembert had lately been the guest of Voltaire
at Ferney, whence he had made frequent visits to Geneva. In his
intercourse with the ministers of that famous city, he came to the
conclusion that their religious opinions were really Socinian, and when
he wrote the article on Geneva he stated this. He stated it in such a
way as to make their heterodox opinions a credit to Genevese pastors,
because he associated disbelief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, in
mysteries of faith, and in eternal punishment, with a practical life of
admirable simplicity, purity, and tolerance. Each line of this eulogy on
the Socinian preachers of Geneva, veiled a burning and contemptuous
reproach against the cruel and darkened spirit of the churchmen in
France. Jesuit and Jansenist, loose abbes and debauched prelates, felt
the quivering of the arrow in the quick, as they read that the morals of
the Genevese pastors were exemplary; that they did not pass their lives
in furious disputes upon unintelligible points; that they brought no
indecent and persecuting accusation against one another before the civil
magistrate. There was gall and wormwood to the orthodox bigot in the
harmless statement that "Hell, which is one of the principal articles of
our belief, has ceased to be one with many of the ministers of Geneva;
it would be, according to them, a great insult to the divinity, to
imagine that this Being, so full of justice and goodness, is capable of
punishing our faults by an eternity of torment: they explain in as good
a sense as they can the formal passages of Scripture which are contrary
to their opinion, declaring that we ought never in the sacred books to
take anything literally, that seems to wound humanity and reason." And
we may be sure that D'Alembert was thinking less of the consistory and
the great council of Geneva, than of the priests and the parliament of
Paris, when he praised the Protestant pastors, not only for their
tolerance, but for confining themselves within their proper functions,
and for being the first to set an example of submission to the
magistrates and the laws. The intention of this elaborate and, reasoned
account of the creed and practice of a handful of preachers in a
heretical town, could not be mistaken by those at whom it was directed.
It produced in the black ranks of official orthodoxy fully as angry a
shock as its writer could have designed.

The church had not yet, we must