Chapter XXV: Sequel and Conclusion (2)

Newton, whose name ought on every other occasion to be mentioned with respect, but who, as a man, may have been liable to error, in the introduction to his commentaries upon Daniel and St. John, ascribes the five books of Moses, Joshua, and Judges to holy writers of much later date; and founds his opinion on the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis, the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first chapters of Judges, the eighth chapter of Samuel, the second chapter of Chronicles, and the fourth chapter of the book of Ruth; and indeed, considering that in the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis we find mention made of Kings, and that David is spoken of in the books of Judges and that of Ruth, it should seem that those books were compiled in the times of the Kings. This is also the opinion of several divines, at the head of whom is the famous Le Clerc. But there are very few of those who are followers of this opinion, that have had the curiosity to fathom these mysteries; a curiosity which certainly makes no part of the duty of man. For when the learned and the ignorant, the prince and the peasant, shall, after this short life, appear together before the throne of Eternal Majesty, every one of us then will wish to have been just and humane, generous and compassionate; and no one will pride himself in having known exactly the year in which the Pentateuch was written, or in having been able to distinguish the true text from the additional notes in use among the Scribes. God will not ask us whether we were of the opinion of the Masorites against the Talmud, or whether we may not have mistaken a _Caph_ for a _Beth_, a _Yod_ for a _Vau_, or a _Daleth_ for a _Resh_. No, certainly; but he will judge us according to our deeds, and not according to our knowledge of the Hebrew language. Let us therefore abide firmly by the decision of the Church, so far as is agreeable to the reasonable duty of a believer.

We will conclude this note with an important passage from Leviticus, a book composed after the time of the golden calf. The Jews are there commanded no more to offer their sacrifices to goats with whom they have gone a-whoring.* We cannot say whether this strange worship came from Egypt, the country of sorcery and superstition; but there is reason to believe, that the custom of our pretended magicians of keeping a Sabbath apart, for adoring a goat, and committing such detestable uncleanliness with it as is shocking to conception, came from the ancient Jews, as it is certain that they first taught a part of Europe the practice of magic. What a detestable people! Surely such infamous and unnatural practices deserve the punishment at least equal to that which befell them for worshipping the golden calf; and yet, we find the lawgiver contents himself with simply prohibiting those practices. We have quoted this subject only to show what the Jewish nation was; the sin of bestiality must certainly have been very common amongst them, since they are the only people we know among whom there was a necessity for any law to prohibit that crime, the commission of which was not even suspected by any other legislators.

* Leviticus vii. and xviii. 22.

There is reason to believe that on account of the fatigues and distresses which the Jews suffered in the deserts of Paran, Horeb, and Kadash-Barnea, the female species, which is always the weakest, might have failed amongst them; and it is certain that the Jews were greatly in want of women, since we find them almost always commanded, when they conquered any town or village, to the right or left of the lake Asphaltes, to put all the inhabitants to the sword, excepting only the young women who were of an age to know man.

The Arabs, who still inhabit a part of these deserts, stipulate to this day in the treaties which they make with the caravans, that they shall furnish them with marriageable women; so that it is not improbable but that the young men of those barren countries might have carried the depravation of human nature so far as to have had carnal commerce with goats, as is related of the shepherds of Calabria.

It is still, however, uncertain whether any monsters were produced by this unnatural copulation, and whether there is any foundation for the ancient stories of satyrs, fauns, centaurs, and minotaurs; history says there is; but natural philosophy has not yet cleared up to us this monstrous circumstance.

[40] Num. xxi 9.

[41] Midian was not included in the Land of Promise; it is a little canton of Idumæa, in Arabia Petræa, beginning to the northward of the torrent of Arron, and ending at the torrent of Zared, in the midst of rocks on the eastern border of the lake Asphaltes. This country is inhabited by a small Arabian horde or tribe, and may be about eight leagues long and about seven in breadth.

[42] Num. xxxi.

[43] Num. xxxi. 40.

[44] It is plain by the text that Jephthah did actually sacrifice his daughter. Doctor Calmet; in his dissertation upon Jephthah’s vow, says, that “God did not approve these vows; but when once any one had made them, he insisted upon their being fulfilled, was it only to punish those who made them, and to put a check upon them in the doing it by fear of being obliged to perform them.” This action of Jephthah is condemned by St. Augustine and almost all the fathers, although the Scripture says that he was filled with the spirit of God; and St. Paul in the eleventh chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews, greatly praises Jephthah, exalting him even above Samuel and David.

St. Jerome, in his Epistle to Julian, expresses himself thus; “Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to the Lord, and therefore the Apostle has placed him among the saints.” Here now is a diversity in opinions, concerning which it is not permitted us to pronounce a decision; nay, it is even dangerous to have any opinion of our own.

[45] The death of Agag, king of the Amalekites, may be looked upon as a real sacrifice. Saul had made this prince a prisoner of war, and had admitted him to a capitulation notwithstanding that the priest and the prophet Samuel had charged him to spare no one; saying to him expressly: “Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”—“And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.”

“The zeal with which this prophet was animated,” says Calmet, “put a sword into his hand on this occasion, to revenge the honor of God, and to confound Saul.”

In this melancholy adventure, we have a vow, a priest, and a victim; consequently, it is a real sacrifice. We find from history that most nations, the Chinese excepted, were wont to sacrifice human victims to the Deity; Plutarch says, that this custom prevailed even among the Romans at some certain times. Cæsar in his “Commentaries” tells us that the Germans were going to sacrifice two of his officers, whom he had sent to confer with their king, Ariovistus, had not Cæsar delivered them by beating the German army. I have in another place observed,* that this violation of the laws of nations, and the offering of human victims, which was rendered more horrible by its being done by the hands of their women, seems a little to contradict Tacitus’s panegyric on them in his treatise “_De Moribus Germanorum_,” which seems rather to have been designed as a satire upon the Roman people, than to praise the Germans, to whom he was an utter stranger. And here we may observe by the way, that Tacitus was fonder of satire than of truth; he labors to throw everything, even the most indifferent actions, into an odious point of light; and his malice pleases us as much as his style, because we are naturally fond of wit and slander.

* Additions to General History, part i., of
Voltaire.

But to return to the subject of human sacrifices. This custom prevailed as much among our forefathers as with the Germans; it is the lowest degree of debasement to which human nature can fall when left to herself, and is one of the effects of the weakness of mortal understanding, which reasons thus: We ought to offer to God whatever we have of most pleasing or valuable; there is nothing more valuable than our children; therefore we ought to select the youngest and most beautiful to sacrifice them to the Deity.

Philo says that the Canaanites used to offer their children in sacrifice, before God had commanded Abraham, as a trial of his faith, to offer up his only son, Isaac.

Sanchoniathon, as quoted by Eusebius, says that the Phœnicians, when threatened with any great danger or distress, offered up the most favorite of their children, and that Ilus sacrificed his son, Jehud, much about the same time that God made the trial of Abraham’s faith. It is very difficult to penetrate into the dark recesses of early antiquity; but it is too melancholy a truth that these horrible sacrifices were almost everywhere in use; and men have laid them aside, only in proportion as they have become civilized. So true is it that civilization is the nurse of humanity.

[46] Ezek. xxxix. 49.

[47] Judges ix. 24.

[48] Judges xvii. last verse.

[49] Judges xviii. 11–29.

[50] Judges xviii. 11–39.

[51] The author evidently confounds Elisha and Elijah.

[52] Those who are unacquainted with the customs of antiquity, and who judge only from what they see about them, may possibly be astonished at this odd command; but they should reflect, that at those times it was the custom in Egypt, and most part of Assyria, to express things by hieroglyphical figures, signs, and types.

The prophets, who were called seers by the Egyptians and Jews, not only expressed themselves in allegories, but also represented by signs those events which they foretold. Thus we find Isaiah, the chief of the four greater prophets, taking a roll and writing therein, “Maher-Shalal-Hashbaz,” that is, “Make haste to the spoil”; and going in unto the prophetess, she conceived and bare a son, whom the Lord called Maher-Shalal-Hashbaz. This is a type of the evils which were to be brought upon the Jews by the people of Egypt and Assyria.

The prophet also says: “Before that the child shall be of an age to eat butter and honey, to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that they abhorred shall be delivered of both her kings; and the Lord will hiss to the flies of Egypt, and for the bees of Assyr, and the Lord will shave with a razor that is hired, the beard and the hair of the feet of the king of Assyria.”*

* Isaiah vii. 15–18.

This prophecy of the bees, and of the shaving of the beard, and of the hair of the feet, can be understood only by those who know that it was a custom to call the swarms of bees together by the sound of a flageolet or pipe, or some other rustic instrument; that the greatest affront that could be done to any man was to cut off his beard; and that the hair on the private parts was called the hair of the feet, which was never shaven but in cases of leprosy, or other unclean disorders. All these figures, which would appear so strange in our style, signify nothing more than that the Lord will, in the course of a few years, deliver His people from captivity.

We find the same prophet walking naked and barefoot to show that the king of Assyria shall lead away the Egyptians and Ethiopians captives, without their having wherewithal to cover their nakedness.†

† Isaiah xx.

The prophet Ezekiel eats the roll of parchment which God had given him; afterwards he eats his bread covered with excrement, and continues to lie on his left side three hundred and ninety days, and forty days on his right side, to show that the Jews should want bread, and as a type of the number of years they were to remain in captivity. He loads himself with chains, as a figure of those that they are to wear; and he cuts off the hair of his head and of his beard, and divides them into three parts; the first of these portions is a type of those who are to perish in the city of Jerusalem; the second, of such as are to be slain without the walls; and the third, of those who are to be carried away to Babylon.‡

‡ Ezek. iv. seq.

The prophet Hosea takes to himself a woman who is an adulteress, and whom he purchases for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer and a half of barley, and says unto her: “Thou shalt abide for me many days, thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be for another man, for so shall the children of Israel abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim”;§ in a word, the seers or prophets scarcely ever foretell anything without using a type or sign of the thing foretold.

§ Hosea iii.

Jeremiah therefore only conformed to the usual custom when he bound himself with cords, and put bonds and yokes upon his neck, as figures of the approaching slavery of those to whom he sent them, and if we attend properly to these things, we shall find the times here spoken of to be like those of an old world, differing in everything from the new society. The laws, the manner of making war, were all absolutely different; and if we only open Homer and the first book of Herodotus, we need nothing more to convince us that there is not the least resemblance between the people of early antiquity and ourselves; hence we ought to distrust our own judgment, when we attempt to compare their manners with ours. Even nature herself is not now the same she was then; magicians and sorcerers had at that time a power over her which they no longer possess; they enchanted serpents, they raised the dead out of their tombs, etc. God sent dreams, and men interpreted them. The gift of prophecy was common. And we read of several metamorphoses, such as of Nebuchadnezzar into an ox, of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, and of five whole cities changed in an instant into a burning lake.

There were likewise several species of men that no longer exist. The race of giants, Rephaim, Emim, Nephilim, and Enacim, have totally disappeared. St. Augustine, in his fifth book “_De Civitate Dei_,” says that he saw a tooth of one of those ancient giants that was at least a hundred times as large as one of our grinders. Ezekiel speaks of pygmies (_Gamadim_), not above a cubit high, who fought at the siege of Tyre; and almost all writers, sacred and profane, have agreed in the truth of these relations.

In fine, the ancient world was so different from ours that there is no drawing any rule for our conduct from it; and if in the earliest ages of antiquity we find mankind mutually persecuting and destroying one another on account of their different faiths, far be it from us, who live under the enlightened law of grace, to copy after such originals.

[53] Jer. xxvii. xxviii.

[54] Isaiah xliv. and xlv.

[55] Malachi i. 1.

[56] Deut. xxviii. 28 and seq.

[57] There is but one passage in the whole Mosaic law from which one might conclude that Moses was acquainted with the reigning opinion among the Egyptians, that the soul did not die with the body. This passage is very particular, and is in the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy: “There shall not be found among you any one that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits (Python), or a wizard, or a necromancer.” From this passage it appears that by invoking the souls of the dead this pretended necromancy supposed a permanency of the soul. It might also happen that the necromancers of whom Moses speaks, being but ignorant deceivers, might not have a distinct idea of the magic they operated. They made people believe that they forced the dead to speak, and by the power of their art restored the body to the same state as when living; without once examining whether their ridiculous operations might authorize the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The ancient magicians were never philosophers; they were at best but a set of stupid jugglers, who played their tricks before as illiterate spectators.

But what is very strange and worthy of observation is that the word “python” should be found in Deuteronomy so long before that Greek term was known to the Hebrews; and indeed this word is not to be found in the Hebrew, of which we have never had a good translation.

There are many insurmountable difficulties in this language; it is a mixture of Phœnician, Egyptian, Syriac, and Arabic, and has undergone many alterations to the present time. The Hebrew verbs had only two moods, the present and the future; the rest were to be guessed at by the sense. The different vowels were frequently expressed by the same characters, or rather, indeed, they were not expressed at all; and the inventors of points have only increased the difficulties they meant to remove. Every adverb had twenty different significations, and the same word had frequently several contrary senses. Add to this that the language was in itself very dry and barren; for the Jews, not being acquainted with the arts, could not express what they knew nothing of. In a word, the Hebrew is to the Greek what the language of a pedant is to that of an academic.

[58] Ezek. xviii. 20.

[59] The opinion of Ezekiel was at length the prevailing one of the synagogue; not but that there were always some Jews who, though they believed in a state of eternal punishment, yet believed at the same time that God punished the sins of the fathers upon the children. At present, indeed, they are punished even beyond the fiftieth generation, and yet are in danger of eternal punishment. It may be asked how the offsprings of those Jews who were not concerned in putting Christ to death can be temporarily punished in the persons of their children, who were as innocent as themselves. This temporal punishment, or rather this manner of living, so different from all other people, and of trading over the whole earth without having any country of their own, cannot be considered as a punishment, compared with what they are to expect hereafter on account of their unbelief, and which they might avoid by a sincere repentance.

[60] Ezek. xx. 25.

[61] Those who have thought to discover the doctrine of hell and heaven, such as it is now believed by us, in the Mosaic books, have been strangely mistaken; their error is owing entirely to an idle dispute about words: the Vulgate having translated the Hebrew word _Sheol_, the pit, by the Latin word _infernum_, and this latter having been rendered in French by _enfer_, hell, they have taken occasion from this equivocal translation to establish a belief that the ancient Hebrews had a notion of the _Hades_ and _Tartarus_ of the Greeks, known to other nations before them by different appellations.

We are told in the sixteenth chapter of Numbers, that the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up Korah, Dathan, and Abiron, and they and all that appertained to them went down alive into the pit, or grave; now certainly there is nothing said in this passage concerning the souls of these three persons, nor yet of the torments of hell, nor of eternal punishments.

It is very extraordinary that the authors of the “_Dictionnaire Encyclopédique_” under the word _hell_ (_enfer_) should say that the ancient Hebrews believed in its existence. If this be true, there would be an insurmountable contradiction in the Pentateuch; for why should Moses have spoken of the punishment after death in one single passage only, of all his works. On this occasion they quote the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy; but after a mutilated manner. The whole passage is as follows: “They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God, they have provoked me to anger with their vanities, and I will move them to jealousy with those that are not a people, I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. For a fire is kindled in my anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell; and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains. I will heap mischiefs upon them; I will spend mine arrows upon them. They shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning heat and with bitter destruction; I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them, with the poison of serpents of the dust.”

But have any or all of these expressions the least relation to the idea of hell-torments? On the contrary, it seems as if these words were purposely inserted to prove that our hell was unknown to the ancient Jews.

The author of this article quotes also the following passage from the twenty-fourth chapter of Job: “The eye of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying, no eye shall see me, and disguiseth his face. In the dark they dig through houses which they had marked for themselves in the daytime. They know not the light, for the morning is to them as the shadow of death; if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death. He is swift as the waters, their portion is cursed in the earth, he beholdeth not the way of the vineyards. Drought and heat consume the snow-waters, so doth the grave those who have sinned.”

I quote these passages entire, otherwise it will be impossible to form a true idea of them. But let me ask if there is the least expression here from which one may conclude that Moses ever taught the Jews the clear and simple doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments?

Not to mention that the Book of Job has nothing to do with the Mosaic law, there is great reason to believe that Job himself was not a Jew; this is the opinion of St. Jerome in his “Hebrew Questions upon Genesis.” The word Satan, which occurs in Job, was not known to the Jews, nor is it anywhere to be found in the five books of Moses. This name, as well as those of Gabriel and Raphael, were entirely unknown to the Jews before their captivity in Babylon. It would appear, then, that Job is very improperly quoted in this place.

But the last chapter of Isaiah is likewise brought in, where it is said: “And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.”

Certainly, the casting out of these bodies to the view of all passengers, even to abhorring, and their being eaten by worms, can never mean that Moses taught the Jews the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and the words “the fire shall not be quenched” can as little signify that the bodies so exposed to public view were to suffer eternal torments in hell.

How can any one quote a passage in Isaiah to prove that the Jews in the time of Moses had adopted the doctrine of the immortality of the soul? According to the Hebrew computation, Isaiah prophesied about the year of the world 3380. Moses lived about the year 2500; therefore there was a distance of eight centuries between the one and the other. Now it is an insult to common sense, a downright mockery, thus to abuse the licence of quoting, by pretending to prove that a writer was of this or that opinion from a passage in another writer who lived eight hundred years after him, and who has not even made any mention of such opinion. It is beyond contradiction that the immortality of the soul, and rewards and punishments after death, are clearly and positively expressed and declared in the New Testament, and it is equally certain, that nothing concerning them is to be found in any one part of the five books of Moses.

Notwithstanding that the Jews did afterwards embrace this doctrine, they were far from having a proper idea of the spirituality of the soul; they thought, in common with most other nations, that the soul was an uncompounded aerial light substance that retained the appearance of the body it had formerly animated; and hence came the term apparition, manes of the dead. Several fathers of the Church were of the same opinion. Tertullian, in his twenty-second chapter “_De Anima_,” expresses himself thus: “_Definimus animam Dei flatu natam, immortalem, corporalem, effigiatam, substantia simplicem_”; that is, “We define the soul a substance, formed by the breath of God; of an immortal, corporeal, figurative, and simple nature.”

St. Irenæus, in the thirty-fourth chapter of his second book, says: “_Incorporales sunt animæ quantum ad comparationem mortalium corporum_.” “Souls are incorporeal in comparison of mortal bodies.” Adding, “Christ has taught us that the soul retains the image of the body”; “_Caracterem corporum in quo adoptantur_,” etc. Christ does not appear ever to have taught such a doctrine, and it is difficult to understand what St. Irenæus means in this passage.

St. Hilarius, in his commentary on St. Matthew, is still more express and positive; he roundly asserts the soul to have a corporeal substance, “_Corpoream naturæ suæ substantiam sortiuntur_.”

St. Ambrose on Abraham, book ii. chap. viii., will have it that there is nothing free from matter, unless it be the substance of the Blessed Trinity.

These reverend fathers seem to have been very indifferent philosophers; but there is the greatest reason to believe that their divinity was in the main very sound, inasmuch as, notwithstanding their ignorance of the incomprehensible nature of the soul, they asserted it to be immortal, and endeavored to make it Christian.

We know that the soul is of a spiritual nature, but we do not at all know what spirit is. We are very imperfectly acquainted with matter; nor is it possible for us to have a distinct idea of what is not matter. Hardly capable of understanding what effects our senses have, we cannot of ourselves know anything of what surpasses the bound of those senses. We carry some few words of our common language into the inexplorable depths of metaphysics and divinity, in order to acquire some slight idea of those things, which we could never conceive or express; and we use those words as props to support the steps of our feeble understandings in travelling through those unknown regions.

Thus we make use of the word spirit, which is the same as breath or air, to express something which is not matter; and this word breath, air, spirit, inspiring us insensibly with an idea of an uncompounded and light substance, we still refine upon this as much as possible, in order to obtain a proper conception of pure and simple spirituality; but we shall never be able to obtain a distinct notion of this, we do not even know what we say, when we pronounce the word substance; in its literal signification, it signifies something beneath, and thereby shows us that it is incomprehensible; for what is meant by that which is beneath? The knowledge of the secrets of God is not to be acquired in this life. Plunged as we are in mortal obscurity, we fight against one another, and strike at random in the darkness with which we are surrounded, without precisely knowing for what we are fighting.

If mankind would consider all this with attention, every reasonable person will be ready to conclude that we ought to have the greatest indulgence for the opinions of others, and by our conduct endeavor to merit the same from them.

The above remarks are not at all foreign to the principal point in question, which is to know whether men are bound to tolerate one another; inasmuch as by proving that in all times those of different opinions have been alike mistaken, it appears to have been the duty of all mankind in every age to treat each other with kindness and forbearance.

[62] The doctrine of predestination is of long standing and universal; we find it in Homer. Jupiter was desirous to save the life of his son Sarpedon; but destiny had marked him for death, and Jupiter was obliged to submit. Destiny was, with the philosophers, either the necessary concatenation of causes and effects necessarily produced by nature, or that same concatenation ordained by Providence; the latter of which is most reasonable. We find the whole system of fatality or predestination, comprised in this line of Annæus Seneca: “_Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt_.” It has always been acknowledged that God governs the universe by eternal, universal and immutable laws; this truth gave rise to the many unintelligible disputes concerning free-will, which had never been defined before the great philosopher Locke arose, who has proved it to be the power of acting. God bestows this power, and man, acting freely according to the eternal decrees of Providence, is one of the wheels of the great machine of the universe. Free-will has been a subject of disputation from all antiquity; but no one until of late times was ever persecuted on this subject. How horrible, how absurd is it to have imprisoned and banished on account of this dispute a Pompone d’Andilly, an Arnauld, a Nicole, a Sacy, and so many others who were the shining lights of France!

[63] The theological romance of the Metempsychosis came from India, a part of the world to which we are indebted for many more fables than is generally believed. We find this doctrine explained by that beautiful poet Ovid, in the twelfth book of his “_Metamorphoses_.” It has been received in almost every part of the world, and has everywhere met with its opposers; nevertheless, we do not find that any priest among the ancients ever caused a disciple of Pythagoras to be sent to prison.

[64] Neither the ancient Jews, the Egyptians, nor the Greeks, their contemporaries, believed that the soul of man went to heaven after death. The Jews thought that the sun and moon were placed some leagues above us in the same circle, and that the firmament was a thick and solid vault, that supported the weight of the waters, which, however, sometimes ran out through the crevices in this vault. The ancient Greeks placed the palace of their gods upon Mount Olympus. And the abode of heroes after death was, in Homer’s time, thought to be in an island beyond the ocean. This likewise was the opinion of the Essenians.

After Homer, planets were assigned to the gods; but there was no more reason for men to place a god in the moon than for the inhabitants of the moon to place a god in our planet of the earth. Juno and Iris had no other palaces assigned them but the clouds, where there was no place to rest the soles of their feet. Among the Sabæans every deity had its star. But as the stars are little suns, it would be impossible to live there without partaking of the nature of fire. Upon the whole, then, it is needless to inquire what the ancients thought of heaven; since the best answer that can be given is, they thought nothing about it.

[65] Matthew xxii. 1–13.

[66] St. Luke xiv.

[67] It was indeed very difficult, not to say impossible, for the Jews to comprehend, without an immediate revelation, the ineyable mystery of the incarnation of God, the Son of God. In the sixth chapter of Genesis we find the sons of great men called “the sons of God.” In like manner the royal Psalmist calls the tall cedars “the cedars of God.” Samuel says, “The fear of God fell upon the people”; that is, a violent fear seized them. A great tempest is called the wind of the Lord, and Saul’s distemper, the melancholy of the Lord. Nevertheless, the Jews seemed to have clearly understood that our Saviour called Himself the Son of God in the proper sense of that word; and if they looked upon this as a blasphemous expression, it is an additional proof of their ignorance of the incarnation, and of God, the Son of God, being sent upon earth for the redemption of mankind.

[68] Matthew xxvi. 61–64.

[69] See that excellent book, entitled, “The Manual of the Inquisition.”

[70] Now Bona, a town of Constantine in Africa. St. Augustine was bishop of this see above forty years. It now belongs to Algiers.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Original printed spelling and grammar are retained, with a few exceptions noted below. Small caps are changed to all capital letters. Italics _look like this_. The original page numbers have been removed. The four illustrations were originally printed full page, with their captions printed alone on an adjacent page. In this edition, the captions are combined appropriately with the illustrations, which are moved to locations near their original locations, but between paragraphs of text. Scans of the original book may be found at archive.org—search for “worksofvoltaire04voltiala”.

There were seventy level-one footnotes, some extending over several pages, and nine level-two footnotes anchored within level-one footnotes. The level-one footnotes were renumbered, and are moved to the ends of their two sections—_Dialogue Between Madame de Maintenon and Mdlle. de l’Enclos_ and _A Treatise on Toleration_. The nested footnotes remain near their anchors.

Page 229: A matching right double quotation mark was added to the phrase _“as God being their King, and exercising justice immediately upon them, according to their transgression or obedience, found it not necessary to reveal to them a doctrine which He reserved for after-times, when He should no longer so directly govern His people_.