The same kind of extreme prejudice which drove Voltaire into maintaining of the Jews, not that they were a people whom we should do very ill either to imitate or admire, but nothing less than that they were the enemies of the human race, found vent in such assertions as that if any one could have restored the Empire to its strength, or at all events retarded its fall, that man was the Emperor Julian.[255] A historian may justly contend, if he thinks that the evidence warrants him, that Julian belongs to the type of virtuous reactionists, just as we may say it of Wesley or the chiefs of the Tractarians. But to make such an assertion as that the repression of Christianity after the middle of the fourth century, even supposing it to have been possible of achievement, could have given back to the rapidly declining empire a strength of which all the roots were lifeless, was to falsify history for the sake of exalting the name of an apostate. A Roman aristocrat, blind to the real operation and comparative value of the forces at work, might be pardoned for holding Christianity guilty of the general dissolution around him; but it was a strange phantasy for a philosopher of the eighteenth century to suppose that the Christian system, in the shape which it had assumed by Julian’s time, did not offer principles of firmer association, than the mere rites of a paganism which was spontaneously decaying with a rapidity that increased day by day.[256] There is no stronger illustration of the twist which polemical fury may give to the most acute intelligence, than this belief of Voltaire’s, that an organisation which had attracted to itself every able and statesmanlike intellect of the time, could do less for the regeneration of the Empire than the initiated disciple of Platonist theurgy.
His account of the history of the church is composed in the same vein, and we may see where Gibbon, who was a reader of Voltaire, drew the inspiration of the solemn sneer with which he sapped solemn creed.[257] ‘So many frauds, so many errors, so many disgusting absurdities,’ says Voltaire, ‘with which we have been inundated for seventeen hundred years, have been unable to do any harm to our religion. It is unquestionably divine, since seventeen centuries of imposture and imbecility have not destroyed it.’[258] Voltaire thought as ill as possible of the century to which he belonged; we cannot therefore charge him with the inconsistency which marks some of his most prominent disciples, who while they accepted such an account of the vileness of the church as he had given them, did not scruple to believe that, as if by miracle, seventeen centuries of steady depravation were _per saltum_ to be followed by an eighteenth and other centuries of boundless virtue and enlightenment. Still it is wonderful that he should have been able to appreciate the admirable character of the best sovereign of the thirteenth century, Lewis IX.,[259] and to describe his motives and his achievements so generously, and yet should never have thought of the education and surrounding spiritual conditions by which such a character had been formed. If the power of Catholicism for evil was so great and decisive, it would have been reasonable to suppose that it had some share also in moulding to good those who came forth from it the very flower of humanity. But Voltaire did not know how much a man is the product of a system operating on, and with, the individual predisposition, or he would not have chidden St. Lewis for remaining on the level of the prejudice of his time, instead of changing the spirit of his age.[260] How should St. Lewis have risen from the prejudice of his age, when it was exactly that prejudice which had formed him, and of which he represented the worthy side?