To the Catholic every Protestant was possessed by a devil; to the Protestant every Catholic was the home of a fiend. All order, all regular succession of causes and effects were known no more; the natural ceased to exist; the learned and the ignorant were on a level. The priest was caught in the net he had spread for the peasant, and Christendom became a vast madhouse, with the insane for keepers.
When Voltaire was born the church ruled and owned France. It was a period of almost universal corruption. The priests were mostly libertines, the judges cruel and venal. The royal palace was a house of prostitution. The nobles were heartless, proud, arrogant and cruel to the last degree. The common people were treated as beasts. It took the church a thousand years to bring about this happy condition of things.
The seeds of the Revolution unconsciously were being scattered by every noble and by every priest.
They were germinating slowly in the hearts of the wretched; they were being watered by the tears of agony; blows began to bear interest. There was a faint longing for blood. Workmen, blackened by the sun, bowed by labor, deformed by want, looked at the white throats of scornful ladies and thought about cutting them.
In those days witnesses were cross-examined with instruments of torture; the church was the arsenal of superstition; miracles, relics, angels and devils were as common as lies.
In order to appreciate a great man we must know his surroundings. We must understand the scope of the drama in which he played--the part he acted, and we must also know his audience.
In England George I. was disporting with the "May-pole" and "Elephant,"
and then George II., jealous and choleric, hating the English and their language, making, however, an excellent image or idol before whom the English were glad to bow--snobbery triumphant--the criminal code getting bloodier every day--223 offences punishable with death--the prisons filled and the scaffolds crowded--efforts on every hand to repress the ambition of men to be men--the church relying on superstition and ceremony to make men good--and the state dependent on the whip, the rope and axe to make men patriotic.
In Spain the Inquisition in full control--all the instruments of torture used to prevent the development of the mind, Spain, that had driven out the Jews, that is to say, her talent; that had driven out the Moors, that is to say, her taste and her industry, was still endeavoring by all religious means to reduce the land to the imbecility of the true faith.
In Portugal they were burning women and children for having eaten meat on a holy day, and this to please the most merciful God.
In Italy the nation prostrate, covered with swarms of cardinals and bishops and priests and monks and nuns and every representative of holy sloth. The Inquisition there also--while hands that were clasped in prayer or stretched for alms, grasped with eagerness and joy the lever of the rack, or gathered fagots for the holy flame.
In Germany they were burning men and women charged with having made a compact with the enemy of man.
And in our own fair land, persecuting Quakers, stealing men and women from another shore, stealing children from their mother's breasts, and paying labor with the cruel lash.
Superstition ruled the world!
There is but one use for law, but one excuse for government--the preservation of liberty--to give to each man his own, to secure to the farmer what he produces from the soil, the mechanic what he invents and makes, to the artist what he creates, to the thinker the right to express his thoughts. Liberty is the breath of progress.
In France, the people were the sport of a king's caprice. Everywhere was the shadow of the Bastile.
It fell upon the sunniest field, upon the happiest home. With the king walked the headsman; back of the throne was the chamber of torture. The Church appealed to the rack, and Faith relied on the fagot. Science was an outcast, and Philosophy, so-called, was the pander of superstition.
Nobles and priests were sacred. Peasants were vermin. Idleness sat at the banquet, and Industry gathered the crumbs and the crusts.
II. THE DAYS OF YOUTH.
VOLTAIRE was of the people. In the language of that day, he had no ancestors. His real name was Francois-Marie Arouet. His mother was Marguerite d'Aumard. This mother died when he was seven years of age.
He had an elder brother, Armand, who was a devotee, very religious and exceedingly disagreeable. This brother used to present offerings to the church, hoping to make amends for the unbelief of his brother. So far as we know, none of his ancestors were literary people.
The Arouets had never written a line. The Abbe de Chaulieu was his godfather, and, although an abbe, was a Deist who cared nothing about religion except in connection with his salary. Voltaire's father wanted to make a lawyer of him, but he had no taste for law. At the age of ten he entered the college of Louis Le Grand. This was a Jesuit school, and here he remained for seven years, leaving at seventeen, and never attending any other school. According to Voltaire, he learned nothing at this school but a little Greek, a good deal of Latin and a vast amount of nonsense.
In this college of Louis Le Grand they did not teach geography, history, mathematics or any science. This was a Catholic institution, controlled by the Jesuits. In that day the religion was defended, was protected or supported by the state. Behind the entire creed were the bayonet, the axe, the wheel, the fagot and the torture chamber.
While Voltaire was attending the college of Louis Le Grand the soldiers of the king were hunting Protestants in the mountains of Cevennes for magistrates to hang on gibbets, to put to torture, to break on the wheel, or to burn at the stake.
At seventeen Voltaire determined to devote his life to literature. The father said, speaking of his two sons Armand and Francois, "I have a pair of fools for sons, one in verse and the other in prose."
In 1713, Voltaire, in a small way, became a diplomat. He went to The Hague attached to the French minister, and there he fell in love. The girl's mother objected. Voltaire sent his clothes to the young lady that she might visit him. Everything was discovered and he was dismissed.
To this girl he wrote a letter, and in it you will find the key note of Voltaire: "Do not expose yourself to the fury of your mother. You know what she is capable of. You have experienced it too well. Dissemble; it is your only chance. Tell her that you have forgotten me, that you hate me; then after telling her, love me all the more."
On account of this episode Voltaire was formally disinherited by his father. The father procured an order of arrest and gave his son the choice of going to prison or beyond the seas. He finally consented to become a lawyer, and says: "I have already been a week at work in the office of a solicitor learning the trade of a pettifogger."
About this time he competed for a prize, writing a poem on the king's generosity in building the new choir in the Cathedral Notre Dame. He did not win it. After being with the solicitor a little while, he hated the law, began to write poetry and the outlines of tragedy. Great questions were then agitating the public mind, questions that throw a flood of light upon that epoch.
In 1552 Dr. Baius took it into his head to sustain a number of propositions touching predestination to the prejudice of the doctrine of free will. The Cordelian monks selected seventy-six of the propositions and denounced them to the Pope as heretical, and from the Pope obtained what was called a Bull. This Bull contained a doubtful passage, the meaning of which was dependent upon the position of a comma. The friends of Dr. Baius wrote to Rome to find where the comma ought to be placed.
Rome, busy with other matter, sent as an answer a copy of the Bull in which the doubtful sentence was left without any comma. So the dispute continued.
Then there was the great controversy between the Jansenists and Molinists. Molini was a Spanish Jesuit, who sustained the doctrine of free will with a subtlety of his own, "man's will is free, but God sees exactly how he will use it." The Presbyterians of our country are still wrestling with this important absurdity.
Jansenius was a French Jesuit who carried the doctrine of predestination to the extreme, asserting that God commands things that are impossible, and that Christ did not die for all.
In 1641 the Jesuits obtained a Bull condemning five propositions of Jansenius. The Jansenists there upon denied that the five propositions--or any of them--were found in the works of Jansenius.
This question of Jansenism and Molinism occupied France for about two hundred years.
In Voltaire's time the question had finally dwindled down to whether the five propositions condemned by the Papal Bull were in fact in the works of Jansenius. The Jansenists proved that the five propositions were not in his book, because a niece of Pascal had a diseased eye cured by the application of a thorn from the crown of Christ.
The Bull Unigenitus was launched in 1713, and then all the prisons were filled with Jansenists. This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries. All these questions were argued pro and con through Switzerland; all of them in Holland for centuries; in Scotland and England and New England, and millions of people are still busy harmonizing foreordination and free will, necessity and morality, predestination and accountability.
Louis XIV. having died, the Regent took possession, and then the prisons were opened. The Regent called for a list of all persons then in the prisons sent there at the will of the king. He found that, as to many prisoners, nobody knew any cause why they had been in prison. They had been forgotten. Many of the prisoners did not know themselves, and could not guess why they had been arrested. One Italian had been in the Bastile thirty-three years without ever knowing why. On his arrival in Paris, thirty-three years before, he was arrested and sent to prison.
He had grown old. He had survived his family and friends. When the rest were liberated he asked to remain where he was, and lived there the rest of his life. The old prisoners were pardoned, but in a little while their places were taken by new ones.
At this time Voltaire was not interested in the great world--knew very little of religion or of government. He was busy writing poetry, busy thinking of comedies and tragedies. He was full of life. All his fancies were winged like moths.
He was charged with having written some cutting epigrams. He was exiled to Tulle, three hundred miles away. From this place he wrote in the true vein--"I am at a chateau, a place that would be the most agreeable in the world if I had not been exiled to it, and where there is nothing wanting for my perfect happiness except the liberty of leaving. It would be delicious to remain, if I only were allowed to go."
At last the exile was allowed to return. Again he was arrested; this time sent to the Bastile, where he remained for nearly a year. While in prison he changed his name from Francois-Marie Arouet to Voltaire, and by that name he has since been known.
Voltaire, as full of life as summer is full of blossoms, giving his ideas upon all subjects at the expense of prince and king, was exiled to England. From sunny France he took his way to the mists and fogs of Albion. He became acquainted with the highest and the best in Britain.
He met Pope, a most wonderful verbal mechanic, a maker of artificial flowers, very much like natural ones, except that they lack perfume and the seeds of suggestion. He made the acquaintance of Young, who wrote the "Night Thoughts;" Young, a fine old hypocrite with a virtuous imagination, a gentleman who electioneered with the king's mistress that he might be made a bishop. He became acquainted with Chesterfield--all manners, no man; with Thomson, author of "The Seasons," who loved to see the sun rise in bed and visit the country in town; with Swift, whose poisoned arrows were then festering in the flesh of Mr. Bull--Swift, as wicked as he was witty, and as heartless as he was humorous--with Swift, a dean and a devil; with Congreve, whom Addison thought superior to Shakespeare, and who never wrote but one great line, "The cathedral looking tranquillity."
III. THE MORN OF MANHOOD.
VOLTAIRE began to think, to doubt, to inquire. He studied the history of the church, of the creed. He found that the religion of his time rested on the inspiration of the Scriptures--the infallibility of the church--the dreams of insane hermits--the absurdities of the Fathers--the mistakes and falsehoods of saints--the hysteria of nuns--the cunning of priests and the stupidity of the people. He found that the Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fausta and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he convened the Council of Nice, to decide whether Christ was a man or the Son of God. The Council decided, in the year 325, that Christ was consubstantial with the Father. He found that the church was indebted to a husband who assassinated his wife--a father who murdered his son, for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Savior. He found that Theodosius called a council at Constantinople in 381, by which it was decided that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father--that Theodosius, the younger, assembled a council at Ephesus in 431, that declared the Virgin Mary to be the mother of God--that the Emperor Marcian called another council at Chalcedon in 451, that decided that Christ had two wills--that Pognatius called another in 680, that declared that Christ had two natures to go with his two wills--and that in 1274, at the council of Lyons, the important fact was found that the Holy Ghost "proceeded," not only from the Father, but also from the Son at the same time.
So, it took about 1,300 years to find out a few things that had been revealed by an infinite God to his infallible church.
Voltaire found that this insane creed had filled the world with cruelty and fear. He found that vestments were more sacred than virtues--that images and crosses--pieces of old bones and bits of wood were more precious than the rights and lives of men, and that the keepers of these relics were the enemies of the human race.
With all the energy of his nature--with every faculty of his mind--he attacked this "Triumphant Beast."
Voltaire was the apostle of common sense. He knew that there could have been no primitive or first language from which all other languages had been formed. He knew that every language had been influenced by the surroundings of the people. He knew that the language of snow and ice was not the language of palm and flower. He knew also that there had been no miracle in language. He knew that it was impossible that the story of the Tower of Babel should be true. He knew that everything in the whole world had been natural. He was the enemy of alchemy, not only in language but in science. One passage from him is enough to show his philosophy in this regard. He says; "To transmute iron into gold, two things are necessary: first, the annihilation of the iron; second, the creation of gold."
Voltaire gave us the philosophy of history.
Voltaire was a man of humor, of good nature, of cheerfulness. He despised with all his heart the philosophy of Calvin, the creed of the sombre, of the severe, of the unnatural. He pitied those who needed the aid of religion to be honest, to be cheerful. He had the courage to enjoy the present and the philosophy to bear what the future might bring.