Page:Voltaire (Hamley).djvu/115

 have very soon aspired to be chiefs of a party. All the books of modern philosophers put together will never make as much noise in the world as was once caused by the dispute of the Franciscans about the shape of their sleeve and their hood."

The reader will think that there is nothing that we have quoted which could be supposed worthy of imprisonment or persecution; yet there is no doubt that Voltaire's apprehensions were but too well founded. Constantly impelled by his active and clear-sighted intellect to combat what he considered to be abuses, he was often induced to withhold from publication what he had written, because he was not prepared to undergo martyrdom for his opinions; and thus it is that many of his works, after lying in his desk for years, and being made known only to intimate friends, slipt into the world, either through a foreign press, or because the hope of profiting by the fame of the great writer had tempted some knavish publisher to get surreptitious possession of a manuscript, and to print it without the author's sanction. With his eagerness for fame this suppression of his writings was a source of mortification, while to one so excitable of temperament the apprehension of arrest was vexatious in extreme degree; and the twofold annoyance thus inflicted naturally aggravated his animosity against the priests, whom he considered the chief authors of the persecution. But, besides personal resentment, there is no doubt that his very genuine philanthropy also prejudiced him against the clergy: he honestly believed that superstition and fanaticism had caused the greatest calamities and bloodiest wars which history tells of; the religion of his persecutors appeared to him as necessarily a