The point where the failure of this quality in Voltaire was especially a source of weakness to his attack, is to be found in the crippling of his historic imagination, and the inability which this inflicted upon him of conceiving the true meaning and lowest roots of the Catholic legend. The middle age between himself and the polytheism of the Empire was a parched desert to him and to all his school, just as to the Protestant the interval between the apostles and Luther is a long night of unclean things. He saw only a besotted people led in chains by a crafty priesthood; he heard only the unending repetition of records that were fictitious, and dogmas that drew a curtain of darkness over the understanding. Men spoke to him of the mild beams of Christian charity, and where they pointed he saw only the yellow glare of the stake; they talked of the gentle solace of Christian faith, and he heard only the shrieks of the thousands and tens of thousands whom faithful Christian persecutors had racked, strangled, gibbeted, burnt, broken on the wheel. Through the steam of innocent blood which Christians for the honour of their belief had spilt in every quarter of the known world, the blood of Jews, Moors, Indians, and all the vast holocausts of heretical sects and people in eastern and western Europe, he saw only dismal tracts of intellectual darkness, and heard only the humming of the doctors, as they served forth to congregations of poor men hungering for spiritual sustenance the draff of theological superstition.
This vehement and blinding antipathy arose partly from the intense force with which the existing aspect of Catholicism recalled all that was worst, and shut out all that was best in its former history. One cannot fairly expect the man who is in the grip of a decrepit tyrant, to do absolutely full justice to the seemly deeds and gracious promises of his tormentor’s youth. But partly also this blindness arose from the fact that Voltaire measured the achievements of Catholicism by the magnitude of its pretensions. He took its supernatural claims seriously, and his intelligence was exasperated beyond control by the amazing disproportion and incongruity between these claims and the most conspicuous of the actual results. Those who have parted company with a religion, as Voltaire had parted company with Christianity, can only be counted upon to award the well-earned praise to its better part, after they have planted themselves stably on the assumption that the given religion is a human and natural force like another.