Chapter 28

It may be well enough here to ask the question: "What is greatness?" A great man adds to the sum of knowledge, extends the horizon of thought, releases souls from the Bastille of fear, crosses unknown and mysterious seas, gives new islands and new continents to the domain of thought, new constellations to the firmament of mind. A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains he gives to others. A great man throws pearls before swine, and the swine are sometimes changed to men. If the great had always kept their pearls, vast multitudes would be barbarians now.

A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy. Greatness is not the gift of majorities; it cannot be thrust upon any man; men cannot give it to another; they can give place and power, but not greatness. The place does not make the man, nor the sceptre the king. Greatness is from within.

The great men are the heroes who have freed the bodies of men; they are the philosophers and thinkers who have given liberty to the soul; they are the poets who have transfigured the common and filled the lives of many millions with love and song. They are the artists who have covered the bare walls of weary life with the triumphs of genius. They are the heroes who have slain the monsters of ignorance and fear, who have outgazed the Gorgon and driven the cruel gods from their thrones.

They are the inventors, the discoverers, the great mechanics, the kings of the useful who have civilized this world.

At the head of this heroic army, foremost of all, stands Voltaire, whose memory we are honoring tonight. Voltaire! a name that excites the admiration of men, the malignity of priests. Pronounce that name in the presence of a clergyman, and you will find that you have made a declaration of war. Pronounce that name, and from the face of the priest the mask of meekness will fall, and from the mouth of forgiveness will pour a Niagara of vituperation and calumny. And yet Voltaire was the greatest man of his century, and did more for the human race than ally other of the sons of men.

On Sunday, the 21st of November, 1694, a babe was born; a babe exceedingly frail, whose breath hesitated about remaining. This babe became the greatest man of the eighteenth century.

When Voltaire came to this "great stage of fools," his country had been christianized--not civilized--for about fourteen hundred years. For a thousand years the religion of peace and good will had been supreme. The laws had been given by christian kings, sanctioned by "wise and holy men."

Under the benign reign of universal love, every court had its chamber of torture, and every priest relied on the thumbscrew and rack. Such had been the success of the blessed gospel that every science was an outcast. To speak your honest thoughts, to teach your fellow men, to investigate for yourself, to seek the truth, these were crimes, and the "Holy Mother Church" pursued the criminals with sword and flame.

The believers in a God of love--an infinite father--punished hundreds of offenses with torture and death. Suspected persons were tortured to make them confess. Convicted persons were tortured to make them give the names of their accomplices. Under the leadership of the church cruelty had become the only reforming power. In this blessed year 1694 all authors were at the mercy of king and priest. The most of them were cast into prisons, impoverished by fines and costs, exiled or executed. The little time that hangmen could snatch from professional duties was occupied in burning books. The courts of justice were traps in which the innocent were caught. The judges were almost as malicious and cruel as though they had been bishops or saints. There was no trial by jury, and the rules of evidence allowed the conviction of the supposed criminal by the proof of suspicion or hearsay. The witnesses, being liable to torture, generally told what the judges wished to hear.

When Voltaire was born the church ruled and owned France. It was a period of almost universal corruption. The priests were mostly libertines, the judges cruel and venal. The royal palace was a house of prostitution. The nobles were heartless, proud, arrogant and cruel to the last degree. The common people were treated as beasts. It took the church a thousand years to bring about this happy condition of things.

The seeds of the revolution unconsciously were being scattered by every noble and by every priest. They were germinating slowly in the hearts of the wretched; they were being watered by the tears of agony; blows began to bear interest. There was a faint longing for blood. Workmen, blackened by the sun, bowed by labor, deformed by want; looked at the white throats of scornful ladies and thought about cutting them. In those days the witnesses were cross-examined with instruments of torture; the church was the arsenal of superstition; miracles, relics, angels, and devils were as common as lies.

Voltaire was of the people. In the language of that day, he had no ancestors. His real name was Francois Marie Arouet. His mother was Marguerite d'Aumard. This mother died when he was seven years of age. He had an elder brother, Armand, who was a devotee, very religious and exceedingly disagreeable. This brother used to present offerings to the church, hoping to make amends for the unbelief of his brother. So far as we know none of his ancestors were literary people. The Arouets had never written a line. The Abbe le Chaulieu was his godfather, and, although an abbe, was a deist who cared nothing about his religion except in connection with his salary. Voltaire's father wanted to make a lawyer of him, but he had no taste for law. At the age of 10 he entered the college of Louis le Grand. This was a Jesuit school, and here he remained for seven years, leaving at 17, and never attending any other school. According to Voltaire he learned nothing at this school but a little Greek, a good deal of Latin, and a vast amount of nonsense.

In this college of Louis le Grand they did not teach geography, history, mathematics, or any science. This was a Catholic institution, controlled by the Jesuits. In that day the religion was defended, was protected, or supported by the state. Behind the entire creed were the bayonet, the ax, the wheel, the fagot, and the torture chamber. While Voltaire was attending the college of Louis le Grand the soldiers of the king were hunting Protestants in the mountains of Cevennes for magistrates to hang on gibbets, to put to torture, to break on the wheel or to burn at the stake.

There is but one use for law, but one excuse for government--the preservation of liberty--to give to each man his own, to secure to the farmer what he produces from the soil, the mechanic what he invents and makes, to the artist what he creates, to the thinker the right to express his thoughts. Liberty is the breath of progress. In France the people were the sport of a king's caprice. Everywhere was the shadow of the Bastille. It fell upon the sunniest field, upon the happiest home. With the king walked the headsman; back of the throne was the chamber of torture. The church appealed to the rack, and faith relied on the fagot. Science was an outcast, and philosophy, so-called, was the pander of superstition. Nobles and priests were sacred. Peasants were vermin. Idleness sat at the banquet and industry gathered the crumbs and crusts.

At 17 Voltaire determined to devote his life to literature. The father said, speaking of his two sons, Armand and Francois: "I have a pair of fools for sons, one in verse and the other in prose." In 1713 Voltaire, in a small way, became a diplomat. He went to The Hague attached to the French minister, and there he fell in love. The girl's mother objected. Voltaire sent his clothes to the young lady that she might visit him. Everything was discovered and he was dismissed. To this girl he wrote a letter, and in it you will find the keynote of Voltaire: "Do not expose yourself to the fury of your mother. You know what she is capable of. You have experienced it too well. Dissemble; it is your only chance. Tell her that you have forgotten me, that you hate me; then after telling her, love me all the more." On account of this episode Voltaire was formally disinherited by his father. The father procured an order of arrest and gave his son the choice of going to prison or beyond the seas. He finally consented to become a lawyer, and says: "I have already been a week at work in the office of a solicitor learning the trade of a pettifogger." About this time he competed for a prize, writing a poem on the king's generosity in building the new choir in the cathedral Notre Dame. He did not win it. After being with the solicitor a little while, he hated the law, he began to write poetry and the outlines of tragedy. Great questions were then agitating the public mind, questions that throw a flood of light upon that epoch.

Louis XIV having died, the regent took possession; and then the prisons were opened. The regent called for a list of all persons then in the prisons sent there at the will of the king. He found that, as to many prisoners, nobody knew any cause why they had been in prison. They had been forgotten. Many of the prisoners did not know themselves, and could not guess why they had been arrested. One Italian had been in the Bastille thirty-three years without ever knowing why. On his arrival to Paris thirty-three years before he was arrested and sent to prison. He had grown old. He had survived his family and friends. When the rest were liberated he asked to remain where he was, and lived there the rest of his life.

The old prisoners were pardoned; but in a little while their places were taken by new ones. At this time Voltaire was not interested in the great world--knew very little of religion or of government. He was busy writing poetry, busy thinking of comedies and tragedies. He was full of life. All his fancies were winged, like moths. He was charged with having written some cutting epigrams. He was exiled to Tulle, three hundred miles away. From this place he wrote in the true vein: "I am at a chateau, a place that would be the most agreeable in the world if I had not been exiled to it, and where there is nothing wanting for my perfect happiness except the liberty of leaving. It would be delicious to remain if I only were allowed to go." At last the exile was allowed to return. Again he was arrested; this time sent to the Bastille, where he remained for nearly a year. While in prison he changed his name from Francois Marie Arouet to Voltaire, and by that name he has since been known. Voltaire began to think, to doubt, to inquire. He studied the history of the church of the creed. He found that the religion of his time rested on the usurpation of the scriptures--the infallibility of the church--the dreams of insane hermits--the absurdities of the fathers--the mistakes and falsehoods of saints--the hysteria of nuns--the cunning of priests and the stupidity of the people. He found that the Emperor Constantine, who lifted christianity into power, murdered his wife Fansta and his eldest son Crispus the same year that he convened the council of Nice to decide whether Christ was a man or the son of God. The council decided, in the year 325, that Christ was consubstantial with the Father. He found that the church was indebted to a husband who assassinated his wife--a father who murdered his son--for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Savior. He found that Theodosius called a council at Constantinople in 381 by which it was decided that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father--that Theodosius, the younger, assembled a council at Ephesus in 431 that declared the Virgin Mary to be the mother of God--that the Emperor Martian called another council at Chalcedon in 451 that decided that Christ had two wills--that Pognatius called another in 680 that declared that Christ had two natures to go with his two wills--and that in 1274, at the council of Lyons, the important fact was found that the Holy Ghost "proceeded" not only from the Father, but also from the Son at the same time.

So Voltaire has been called a mocker! What did he mock? He mocked kings that were unjust; kings who cared nothing for the sufferings of their subjects. He mocked the titled fools of his day. He mocked the corruption of courts; the meanness, the tyranny, and the brutality of judges. He mocked the absurd and cruel laws, the barbarous customs. He mocked popes and cardinals, bishops and priests, and all the hypocrites on the earth. He mocked historians who filled their books with lies, and philosophers who defended superstition. He mocked the haters of liberty, the persecutors of their fellow-men. He mocked the arrogance, the cruelty, the impudence and the unspeakable baseness of his time.

He has been blamed because he used the weapon of ridicule. Hypocrisy has always hated laughter, and always will. Absurdity detests humor and stupidity despises wit. Voltaire was the master of ridicule. He ridiculed the absurd, the impossible. He ridiculed the mythologies and the miracles, the stupid lives and lies of the saints. He found pretense and mendacity crowned by credulity. He found the ignorant many controlled by the cunning and cruel few. He found the historian, saturated with superstition, filling his volumes with the details of the impossible, and he found the scientists satisfied with "they say." Voltaire had the instinct of the probable. He knew the law of average; the sea level; he had the idea of proportion; and so he ridiculed the mental monstrosities and deformities--the non sequiturs--of his day. Aristotle said women had more teeth than men. This was repeated again and again by the Catholic scientists of the eighteenth century. Voltaire counted the teeth. The rest were satisfied with "they say."

We may, however, get an idea of the condition of France from the fact that Voltaire regarded England as the land of liberty. While he was in England he saw the body of Sir Isaac Newton deposited in Westminster Abbey. He read the works of this great man and afterward gave to France the philosophy of the great Englishman. Voltaire was the apostle of common sense. He knew that there could have been no primitive or first language from which all other languages had been formed. He knew that every language had been influenced by the surroundings of the people. He knew that the language of snow and ice was not the language of palm and flower. He knew also that there had been no miracle in language. He knew it was impossible that the story of the Tower of Babel should be true. That everything in the whole world had been natural. He was the enemy of alchemy, not only in language, but in science. One passage from him is enough to show his philosophy in this regard. He says: "To transmute iron into gold two things are necessary. First, the annihilation of the iron; second, the creation of gold." Voltaire was a man of humor, of good nature, of cheerfulness. He despised with all his heart the philosophy of Calvin, the creed of the somber, of the severe, of the unnatural. He pitied those who needed the aid of religion to be honest, to be cheerful. He had the courage to enjoy the present and the philosophy to bear what the future might bring. And yet for more than a hundred and fifty years the Christian world has fought this man and has maligned his memory. In every christian pulpit his name has been pronounced with scorn, and every pulpit has been an arsenal of slander. He is one man of whom no orthodox minister has ever told the truth. He has been denounced equally by Catholics and Protestants.

Priests and ministers, bishops and exhorters, presiding elders and popes have filled the world with slanders, with calm calumnies about Voltaire. I am amazed that ministers will not or cannot tell the truth about an enemy of the church. As a matter of fact, for more than 1,000 years almost every pulpit has been a mint in which slanders were coined.

For many years this restless man filled Europe with the product of his brain. Essays, epigrams, epics, comedies, tragedies, histories, poems, novels, representing every phase and every faculty of the human mind. At the same time engrossed in business, full of speculation, making money like a millionaire, busy with the gossip of courts, and even with the scandals of priests. At the same time alive to all the discoveries of science and the theories of philosophers, and in this babel never forgetting for a moment to assail the monster of superstition. Sleeping and waking he hated the church. With the eyes of Argus he watched, and with the arms of Briarieius he struck. For sixty years he waged continuous and unrelenting war, sometimes in the open field, sometimes striking from the hedges of opportunity, taking care during all this time to remain independent of all men. He was in the highest sense successful. He lived like a prince, became one of the powers of Europe, and in him, for the first time, literature was crowned. Voltaire, in spite of his surroundings, in spite of almost universal tyranny and oppression, was a believer in God and in what he was pleased to call the religion of nature. He attacked the creed of his time because it was dishonorable to his God. He thought of the Deity as a father, as the fountain of justice, intelligence and mercy, and the creed of the Catholic church made him a monster of cruelty and stupidity. He attacked the bible with all the weapons at his command. He assailed its geology, its astronomy, its idea of justice, its laws and customs, its absurd and useless miracles, its foolish wonders, its ignorance on all subjects, its insane prophecies, its cruel threats, and its extravagant promises. At the same time he praised the God of nature, the God who gives us rain and light, and food and flowers, and health and happiness--he who fills the world with youth and beauty.

In 1755 came the earthquake at Lisbon. This frightful disaster became an immense interrogation. The optimist was compelled to ask, "What was my God doing? Why did the Universal Father crush to shapelessness thousands of his poor children, even at the moment when they were upon their knees returning thanks to Him?" What could be done with this horror? If earthquake there must be, why did it not occur in some uninhabited desert on some wide waste of sea? This frightful fact changed the theology of Voltaire. He became convinced that this is not the best possible of all worlds. He became convinced that evil is evil here, now and forever.

Who can establish the existence of an infinite being? It is beyond the conception--the reason--the imagination of man--probably or possibly--where the zenith and nadir meet this God can be found.

Voltaire, attacked on every side, fought with every weapon that wit, logic, reason, scorn, contempt, laughter, pathos and indignation could sharpen, form, devise or use. He often apologized, and the apology was an insult. He often recanted, and the recantation was a thousand times worse than the thing recanted. He took it back by giving more. In the name of eulogy he flayed his victim. In his praise there was poison. He often advanced by retreating, and asserted by retraction. He did not intend to give priests the satisfaction of seeing him burn or suffer. Upon this very point of recanting, he wrote: "They say I must retract. Very willingly. I will declare the Pascal is always right. That if St. Luke and St. Mark contradict one another it is only another proof of the truth of religion to those who know how to understand such things; and that another lovely proof of religion is that it is unintelligible. I will even avow that all priests are gentle and disinterested; that Jesuits are honest people; that monks are neither proud nor given to intrigue, and that their odor is agreeable; that the Holy Inquisition is the triumph of humanity and tolerance. In a word, I will say all that may be desired of me, provided they leave me in repose, and will not prosecute a man who has done harm to none."

He gave the best years of his wondrous life to succor the oppressed, to shield the defenseless, to reverse infamous decrees, to rescue the innocent, to reform the laws of France, to do away with torture, to soften the hearts of priests, to enlighten judges, to instruct kings, to civilize the people, and to banish from the heart of man the love and lust of war. Voltaire was not a saint. He was educated by the Jesuits. He was never troubled about the salvation of his soul. All the theological disputes excited his laughter, the creeds his pity, and the conduct of bigots his contempt. He was much better than a saint. Most of the Christians in his day kept their religion not for everyday use but for disaster, as ships carry lifeboats to be used only in the stress of storm.

Voltaire believed in the religion of humanity--of good and generous deeds. For many centuries the church had painted virtue so ugly, sour and cold that vice was regarded as beautiful. Voltaire taught the beauty of the useful, the hatefulness and hideousness of superstition. He was not the greatest of poets, or of dramatists, but he was the greatest man of his time, the greatest friend of freedom, and the deadliest foe of superstition. He wrote the best French plays--but they were not wonderful. He wrote verses polished and perfect in their way. He filled the air with painted moths--but not with Shakespearean eagles.

You may think that I have said too much; that I have placed this man too high. Let me tell you what Goethe, the great German, said of this man: "If you wish depth, genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy, elevation, originality, nature, intellect, fancy, rectitude, facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance, variety, fertility, warmth, magic, charm, grace, force, an eagle sweep of vision, vast understanding, instruction rich, tone excellent, urbanity, suavity, delicacy, correctness, purity, cleanness, eloquence, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gayety, pathos, sublimity, and universality perfection, indeed, behold Voltaire."

Even Carlyle, the old Scotch terrier, with the growl of a grizzly bear, who attacked shams, as I have sometime thought, because he hated rivals, was forced to admit that Voltaire gave the death stab to modern superstition. It was the hand of Voltaire that sowed the seeds of liberty in the heart and brain of Franklin, of Jefferson, and of Thomas Paine.

Toulouse was a favored town. It was rich in relics. The people were as ignorant as wooden images, but they had in their possession the dried bodies of seven apostles--the bones of many of the infants slain by Herod--part of a dress of the Virgin Mary, and lots of skulls and skeletons of the infallible idiots known as saints.