Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/17

 the irony of Voltaire is legitimate. Christian bodies have, of late years, made repeated attempts to induce our leaders of culture to profess the Christian faith. The issue has been to make it clear that the great majority of our professors, distinguished writers, and artists hold either the simple theism of Voltaire or discard even that. The doctrines attacked here by Voltaire are wholly discredited. Yet they are still the official teaching of the Churches (except of the Congregationalists); they are largely enforced on innocent children, and they are literally accepted by some millions of our people. I see no reason to refrain from letting the irony of Voltaire fall on them once more.

The reader must not, however, conclude at once that the following pages are so many red-hot charges into the tottering ranks of mediæval dogmas. My aim has been to illustrate the versatility of Voltaire's genius, and to exhibit his own sincere creed no less than his most penetrating scourges of what most educated men in his time and ours regard as utterly antiquated delusions. There are pages here that might receive a place of honour in the most orthodox religious journals of England; other pages in which the irony is so subtle and the temper so polite that, without the terrible name, they would puzzle many a clergyman. In the Questions of Zapata, however, and in parts of one or two other essays, I have given specimens of the Voltaire who was likened to Antichrist.

The selection opens with the Treatise on Toleration, which has a mainly historical interest, and illustrates the finest side of Voltaire's work and