It seems useful, in presenting to English readers
this selection of the works of Voltaire, to recall
the position and personality of the writer and the
circumstances in which the works were written. It
is too lightly assumed, even by m^any who enjoy the
freedom which he, more than any, won for Europe, and who may surpass him in scepticism, that Voltaire is a figure to be left in a discreetly remote niche of memory. *' Other times, other manners '^ is one of the phrases he contributed to modern literature. Let us genially acknowledge that he played a great part in dispelling the last mists of the Middle Ages, and politely attribute to the papal perversity and the lingering vulgarity of his age the more effective features of his work. Thus has Voltaire become a mere name to modern rationalists; a name of fading brilliance, a mionumental name, but nothing more.
This sentiment is at once the effect and the cause
of a very general ignorance concerning Voltaire; and it is a reproach to us. W6 have time, amid increasing knowledge, to recover the most obscure personalities of the Middle Ages and of antiquity; we trace the most elementarv contributors to modern culture; and we neglect one of the mightiest forces that made the development of modern culture possible. 1 do not speak of Voltaire the historian, who, a distin^ished writer says, introduced history for the first time into the realm of letters ; Voltaire the diramatist, whose name is inscribed for ever in the temple of the tragic muse; Voltaire the physicist, who drove the old Cartesianism out of France, and imposed on it the fertile principles of Newton; Voltaire the social reformer, who talked to eighteenth- century kings of the rights of man, and scourged every judicial criminal of his aristocratic age; Voltaire the cosmopolitan, who boldly set up England's ensign of liberty in feudal France. All these things were done by the " flippant Voltaire " of the flippant modern preacher. But he can be considered here -ijnly as one of the few who, in an age of profound i inequality, used the privilege of his enlightenment to enlighten his fellows; one of those who won for us that liberty to think rationally, and to speak freely, on religious matters which we too airily attribute to our new goddess. Evolution.
The position of Voltaire in the development of
religious thought in Europe is unique. Even if his
words had no application in our age, it merits the
most grateful consideration. Trace to its sources
the spirit that has led modern France and modern
Portugal to raise civic ideals above creeds, and
that will, within a few decades, find the same expression in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and half of America. You find yourself in the first half of the nineteenth century, when, in all those countries, a few hundred men, and some women, maintained a superb struggle with restored monarchs and restored 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 centurv, 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 chateau 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 5 proved mightier than all the sceptres of its kings. "^"To ignore Voltaire is to ignore history.