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 VOLTAIEE

VOSMAER

Great for nearly three years a long asso ciation for two men of such different temperaments. At Berlin he finished his Siecle de Louis XIV, and began his Dic- tionnaire Philosophique. Permission to return to France was refused, and he settled in Switzerland. In 1758 he bought an estate at Ferney, four miles from Geneva, yet on French soil, and from the security and comfort of this convenient home he poured out the flood of satires, stories, poems, etc., which (rather than his great dramas) have made him immortal. Candida was published in 1759, to ridicule the optimistic Theism of Eousseau and the orthodox ; and after that date his out put was enormous. It is more material to notice that his mature idealism was expressed in a hundred practical ways. A more kindly and generous lord of the manor none could have. He even built a church for his people, and he promoted the industries of the district with excellent wisdom. He was now wealthy. Some of his works sold as many as 300,000 copies. With his wealth he, in the words of the historian Lanson, &quot;chased misery from his part of France.&quot; Horrible miscarriages of justice still occurred, especially in the name of religion, and time after time (the Galas case, the Sirven case, etc.) the &quot; mocker,&quot; and now aged writer, flung himself ardently into the fray, and generally secured a posthumous justice. His Traite de la ToUrance (1766), which was con demned by Kome, was a dignified rebuke to Europe. His Commentaire sur le livre des dclits (1768) was a fine lesson in justice to civilization, and was put on the Index. His fame rose throughout the world as his clerical opponents sank one by one into unhonoured graves. Voltaire was im measurably the greatest Rationalist who ever lived. He remained to the end a Deist, though his poem on the Lisbon earthquake (1756) shows him wavering for a moment ; and in the best and last expression of his mature views, II faut choisir (1772), his God is not a Creator (matter is eternal), but merely an Infinite 853

and Eternal Being. In the same work (translated in McCabe s Selected Works of Voltaire, 1911) he rejects freewill and ridicules the idea of &quot; soul.&quot; In 1778 Voltaire was invited to Paris, and the extraordinary enthusiasm and excitement killed him. In the notice of Voltaire in the Encyclopcedia Britannica Professor Saintsbury says : &quot; The legends about his death in a state of terror and despair are certainly false ; but it must be regarded as singular and unfortunate that he who had more than once gone out of his way to conform, ostentatiously, with his tongue in his cheek should have neglected or missed this last opportunity.&quot; Priests had been summoned as Voltaire lay dying, and Voltaire had refused to let them approach him. It is rather &quot; singular and unfor tunate &quot; that the English critic fails to appreciate this last act of courage (for there was a grave possibility of disturbance at his funeral) and love of truth on the part of the dying man. Voltaire suffered terribly in his last few days, but he ended peacefully, courteously declining to see the priest. The form of confession of faith which he had written a few weeks before was recognized by all as &quot;a scrap of paper,&quot; for the formal purpose of securing a decent and quiet funeral. His remains were interred with great honour in the Pantheon in 1791 ; but the first act of the Catholics on their return in 1814 was to cast them into a pit outside Paris. He had many defects the defects of his morally sceptical age, whether Catholic or not but his services to the race and the general dignity and courage of his mature years raise him immeasurably above his religious contemporaries. D. May 30, 1778.

YOSMAER, Carel, LL.D., Dutch writer and artist. B. Mar. 20, 1826. Ed. Leyden University. Vosmaer was trained in law, and he obtained an appointment at the Hague Court of Cassation. At the same time he devoted himself to journalism and literature. He published Studies on War

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