ever has heard, or ever will hear, what the Pharisees and Pontius Pilate had to say for themselves. The victory of Christianity over its antagonists was only too complete, for in order to be sure that a controversy has reached its proper termination, it is essentially necessary to know what was said on both sides. So long as one side only can be heard, you can never be quite sure that you fully understand the case at issue. Till the days of Voltaire Christianity had never been attacked openly, avowedly, and on anything like equal terms, in Western Europe. Montaigne, Bayle, and some other writers of the same kind, veiled their hostility to Christianity by an assumed modesty as to the different functions of reason and faith, or by seeking, as Hobbes did, to rationalize it. The English Deists in the early part of the eighteenth century introduced a different mode of attack of which Voltaire is the great representative. Its specific characteristic is downright, uncompromising, bitter hostility, arising from heartfelt dislike and dissent. Voltaire was no mere speculator or philosopher. He was, above all things, a controversialist, a propagandist, a man who had an immediate practical object in what he wrote. A few lines in Condorcet's life of him-one of the most unsatisfactory accounts of a great man, by the way, that ever pretended to be a biography-set his feelings on this point in a sufficiently striking light.

His zeal against a religion which he regarded as the cause of the fanaticism which has desolated Europe since its birth, of the superstition which had brutalized it, and as the source of the mischief which these enemies of human nature still continued to do, seemed to double his activity and his forces. "I am tired," he said one day, "of hearing it repeated that twelve men were enough to establish Christianity. I want to show them that one will be enough to destroy it."

That such was his object, and that he did in fact exhaust the resources of his genius upon it for many years, with effects of which we are still far from having seen the end, is sufficiently notorious, but we doubt whether the particular nature of the means by which he tried to effect his object are nearly so well known. The works of which the titles at least are in every one's mouth

are far from expressing such sentiments. They are not to be found in the best known of his plays or histories. They form a separate class of his voluminous writings, and are included under the two heads of philosophy and literature which in one of the most manageable editions of his works fill three volumes containing respectively 1,602, 1,828, and 1,708 octavo pages, containing fifty lines to the page, and printed in small type. Of course many other matters besides his attacks on Christianity are included in this ample section of his works. Without professing to have read the whole of the 5,000 and odd pages in question, we will try to give our readers some account of the general nature of their theological, metaphysical, and moral doctrines, and of the style and temper in which they are written.

Other parts

The following is a rough classification of his principal works on these subjects. The largest by far, and the one of which the title is most generally known, is the Dictionnaire Philosophique, which in the edition already referred to fills very nearly the whole of a volume of 1,828 pages. In a commoner edition it fills four ordinary octavos. It is a collection of speculations upon every conceivable subject, beginning with an article on the Alphabet, and ending with one on Zoroaster. Part of it was left in manuscript at the author's death. were published in his lifetime in various forms. The original title of the most important work so published was Questions à des Amateurs sur l'Encyclopédie. Next in size to this is the book called Examen important de Lord Bolingbroke, which professes to be an abstract "of the most eloquent, the most profound, the deepest, and the strongest book yet written against fanaticism." The preface goes on to say that "this précis of the doctrines of Lord Bolingbroke, which are collected at large in the six volumes of his posthumous works, was addressed by him a few years before his death, to Lord Cornbury. This edition is much larger than the first. We have collated it with the MS." To this the editors of the Kehl edition of Voltaire append a note:-"On peut croire que tout cela est supposé, ainsi que la date de 1736. L'ouvrage est de 1767, temps où l'on ne pouvait encore

défendre la cause de l'humanité contre le fanaticisme qu'avec beaucoup de précaution." This is worth notice, because almost every one of Voltaire's religious or anti-religious works is written under some false name or other. The book is a very rapid and condensed sketch of the rise of Judaism and of Christianity as Voltaire conceived of them. There are besides a smaller essay called Dieu et les Hommes, and a Histoire de l'Etablissement du Christianisme. Some notes on the different books of the Bible and on the apocryphal Gospels may also be referred to this division of Voltaire's works.

The rest of his writings on religion are to the last degree fragmentary, and are all short, although their aggregate bulk is enormous. One large division of them is composed of dialogues and conversations, which fill a thin octavo volume, and discuss all manner of moral and religious subjects. They are thirtyone in number, two being more elaborate than the rest. Of these, one set is called L'A, B, C, and is supposed to be a translation from the English; indeed one of the interlocutors is English, and many of his opinions are no doubt intended to represent those which Voltaire regarded as characteristic of this country. The other is a dialogue between Euhemerus and Callicrates, two Syracusan philosophers of the age of Alexander. There are besides a great number of isolated tracts, of which the following are a few of the more remarkable: Traité de Metaphysique, addressed to the Marquise du Chatelet, a very short treatise, for it fills only thirty-four pages; Le Philosophe Ignorant, which is something of the same kind, and of much the same length, though written forty years afterward; Il faut prendre un Parti, oule Prin cipe d'Action, which goes again over the same ground; a criticism on Pascal; a tract called Les Questions de Zapata. It would, however, be endless to give the names of them all. Besides the writings which treat avowedly of the great moral and religious questions which he discussed so sedulously, novels were a wonderful instrument of propagandism in Voltaire's hands. It is almost superfluous to give the names of some of them. Every one has read Candide, Zadig, L'Ingénu, and Micromégas, though some

of the others are less well known. The curious Histoire de Jenni (Johnny) is remarkable for giving in a condensed form, and perhaps for the fiftieth time, a summary of Voltaire's conception of things human and divine, which on this occasion is fathered on Sherlock, from whom the novel is said to be translated. Condorcet's Life of Voltaire contains a characteristic remark on these books, which shows, among other things, how profoundly practical Voltaire's object was in all that he wrote, and how keenly he was sensible to the pleasure of propagating his views even amongst those who were far from being able to appreciate them:

Few books of philosophy are more useful [than novels]; they are read by frivolous people, who are alarmed or repelled by the bare name of a philosopher, and whom nevertheless it is important to snatch from prejudices, and to set against the large number of persons interested in their defence. The hu

man race would be condemned to eternal errors if, in order to set it free from prejudice, it was necessary for it to study and meditate the proofs of truth. Happily natural justness of spirit is sufficient for simple truths, which are also the most necessary. It is enough, then, to find a means of fixing the attention of idle people, and especially of engraving these truths in their memory. This is the great use of philosophical romances.

To attempt anything like a detailed criticism of these works would be not only an endless but a useless task. They repeat the same things over and over again, with so much persistensy, and such an inexhaustible variety of phrase and illustration, that the pith of their common teaching on most points of importance may be extracted with comparatively little trouble from any one of them. For instance, Voltaire's view of the nature of the soul is set out in the following amongst other places in his works:-1. Traité de Métaphysique, ch. v. 2. De l'Âme, par Soranus, Medecin de Trajan. 3. Lettres de Memmius à Cicéron, XIII-XV. 4. Il faut prendre un Parti, X.-XII. 5. Lucretius et Posidonius, Dialogue II. 6. Cusu et Kou, Dial. III. 7. Sophronimus et Adelos. 8. L'A, B, C, 2d Dialogue. 9. Dictionnaire Philosophique, art Âme," and many others. 10. Les Oreilles du Comte Chesterfield, etc., etc. In each of these, and in many other parts

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