Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/9

 Jesuits for the liberty that had been wrested from them; and you find that the vast majority of them were disciples of Voltaire. Go back to the very beginning of the anti-clerical movement; seek the generators of that intellectual and emotional electricity which, gathering insensibly in the atmosphere of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, burst at last in the lurid flashes and the rolling thunders of the Great Revolution. On the religious side, with which alone I am concerned here, that devastating storm was overwhelmingly due to the writings of Voltaire. Rousseau, it is true, gave to the world his simple Deistic creed, and with sweet reasonableness lodged it in the minds of many; Diderot and d'Holbach and La Mettrie impressed their deeper scepticism with a weight of learning. But Voltaire was the oracle of Europe. "I have no sceptre, but I have a pen," he once said to Frederick the Great. And when, in his later years, he poured out from his remote château on the Swiss frontier the flood of satires, stories, sermons, dialogues, pamphlets, and treatises which ate deep into the fabric of old Europe, his pen proved mightier than all the sceptres of its kings. To ignore Voltaire is to ignore history.

My object, however, in introducing to English readers these few characteristic specimens of his anti-clerical work is not solely to bespeak some gratefulness for the toleration and freedom which he enforced on a reluctant world, or to gratify a simple curiosity as to the character of his power. These are not dead words, not ashes of an extinct fire, which we disinter; for the world is not dead