Page:Voltaire (Hamley).djvu/109

 and felt his way carefully by gaining opinions about it. "I have read," he says, "to Cardinal Fleury two letters on the Quakers which I had taken great care to cut and trim, so as not to frighten his devout and sage Eminence. He has found what was left pleasant enough, but the poor man does not know what he has lost." Finally, the Rouen publisher, instigated by the hope of profit which Voltaire's extraordinary repute promised, gave them to the world without the permission of the author. The opposition they aroused was even more violent than Voltaire had anticipated,—the publisher was sent to the Bastille; the whole edition was seized and burnt by order of the Parliament; and the author, finding that another warrant was out against him, found it necessary to seek concealment. "I fear much," he says, "that in present circumstances a fatal blow may be dealt me. There are times when one may do anything with impunity; at others nothing is blameless. It is my hap to experience the hardest treatment for the most frivolous causes. Yet, in two months from this, I might possibly print the Koran without censure." The reader who considers the specimens of these terrible letters, about to be given, will probably agree with Voltaire that it was the writer rather than the book that was the object of such unreasonable persecution.

It is easy to see how a discussion on the various religious sects to be found in England might be made to convey reflections on the Catholic priesthood. He begins with the Quakers. "It seems to me," he says, "that the doctrine and history of a people so remarkable as the Quakers deserve the curiosity of a reasonable man." He had therefore sought an interview with "one of the