Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
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 many who enjoy the freedom which he, more t...
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 th...
2. Part 2The murder of Calas, which was perpetrated with the sword of justice at Toulouse on March 9, 1762, is one of the most singular events that deserve the attention of our own and o...
3. Part 3But, as they denied the existence of Purgatory, which it is not permitted to doubt, and which brought a considerable income to the monks; and as they did not venerate relics, wh...
4. Part 4It is evident, moreover, that he was the victim of a furious party, angered against him. He had made irreconcilable enemies of the sophists, orators, and poets who taught in the...
5. Part 5Shall we tell the story of the young St. Romanus? He was cast into the flames, says Eusebius, and certain Jews who were present insulted Jesus Christ for allowing his followers...
6. Part 6God is equally favourable to Kir, or Koresh, or Kosroes, whom we call Cyrus. He calls him “his Christ,” “his Anointed,” although he was not anointed in the ordinary meaning of t...
7. Part 7If the masters of error--the grand masters--so long paid and honoured for brutalising the human species, ordered us to-day to believe that the seed must die in order to germinat...
8. Part 8God has given you understanding; he cannot wish that you should pervert it. How could a proposition of which you can never have an idea be necessary to you? It is a fact of dail...
9. Part 9Parables make up the whole of the profane theology of antiquity. Saturn devouring his children is evidently time destroying its own works. Minerva is wisdom; she is formed in th...
10. Part 10He who writes to you is more a citizen than this Saul Paul, who, it is said, boasted of being one, and assuredly was not. For Tarsus, if he came from there, was not made a Roman...
11. Part 11It is a very ancient superstition that the last words of the dying are prophetic, or are, at least, sacred maxims and venerable precepts. It was believed that the soul, about to...
12. Part 12The point on which all men of all times agree must be the centre of truth, and the points on which they all differ must be standards of falsehood. Religion must conform to moral...
13. Part 13In the first place, Jesus is described as a descendant of Abraham and David, and the writer Matthew counts forty-two generations in two thousand years. In his list, however, we...
14. Part 1437º. The story of Ehud gives me even greater trouble. I see that the Jews were always in bondage, in spite of the help of their God, who had sworn to give them all the country b...
15. Part 15It is eternal, for it cannot be produced from nothing, which, being nothing, can produce nothing; given the existence of something, it is demonstrated that something has existed...
16. Part 16A ball that drives another, a hunting-dog that necessarily and voluntarily follows a stag, a stag that leaps a great ditch not less necessarily and voluntarily, a roe that gives...
17. Part 17The first difference between them and us is that the source of our religion was hidden for a very long time from the rest of the earth. The dogmas of our fathers were buried, li...
18. Part 18But how conceive a God supremely good, Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves, Yet scatters evil with as large a hand? What eye can pierce the depth of his designs? From tha...