Chapter I: "Deo erexit Voltaire"

The visitor to Geneva whose studies have made him duly acquainted with the most interesting human personality of all that are associated with that historic city will never leave the place without making a pilgrimage to the chateau of Ferney. In that refined and quiet rural homestead things still remain very much as on the day when the aged Voltaire left it for the last visit to Paris, where his long life was worthily ended amid words and deeds of affectionate homage. One may sit down at the table where was written the most perfect prose, perhaps, that ever flowed from pen, and look about the little room with its evidences of plain living and high thinking, until one seems to recall the eccentric figure of the vanished Master, with his flashes of shrewd wisdom and caustic wit, his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his consuming hatred of bigotry and oppression, his merciless contempt for shams, his boundless enthusiasm of humanity. As we stroll in the park, that quaint presence goes along with us till all at once in a shady walk we come upon something highly significant and characteristic, the little parish church with its Latin inscription over the portal, _Deo erexit Voltaire_, i. e. "Voltaire built it for God," and as we muse upon it, the piercing eyes and sardonic but not unkindly smile seem still to follow us. What meant this eccentric inscription?

When Voltaire became possessor of the manor of Ferney, the church was badly out of repair, and stood where it obstructed the view from certain windows of the chateau. So he had it cleared away, and built in a better spot the new church that is still there. It was duly consecrated, and the Pope further hallowed it with some relics of ancient saints, and there for many a year the tenants and dependents of the manor assembled for divine service. Nowhere in France had Voltaire ever seen a church dedicated simply to God; it was always to Our Lady of This or Saint So-and-so of That; always there was some intermediary between the devout soul and the God of its worship. Not thus should it be with Voltaire's church, built upon his own estate to minister to the spiritual needs of his people. It should be dedicated simply and without further qualification to the worship and service of God. Furthermore, it was built and dedicated, not by any ecclesiastical or corporate body, but by the lord of that manor, the individual layman, Voltaire.

This, I say, was highly characteristic and significant. It gave terse and pointed expression to Voltaire's way of looking at such things. Church and theology were ignored, and the individual soul was left alone with its God. The Protestant reformers and other freethinkers had stopped far short of this. In place of an infallible Church they had left an infallible Book; if they rejected transubstantiation, they retained as obligatory such doctrines as those of the incarnation and atonement; if they laughed at the miracles of mediŠval saints, they would allow no discredit to be thrown upon those of the apostolic age; in short, they left standing a large part, if not the larger part, of the supernatural edifice within which the religious mind of Europe had so long been sheltered. But Voltaire regarded that whole supernatural edifice as so much rubbish which was impeding the free development of the human mind, and ought as quickly as possible to be torn to pieces and cleared away. His emotions as well as his reason were concerned in this conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it then existed in France, was responsible for much atrocious injustice, and in neighbouring lands the Inquisition still existed. Ecclesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of ignorance, whatever tended to hold people in darkness and restrain them from the free and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire hated with all the intensity of which he was capable. He summed it all up in one abstract term and personified it as "The Infamous," and the watchword of that life of tireless vigilance was "Crush the Infamous!" Supernatural theology had been too often pressed into the service of "The Infamous," and for supernatural theology Voltaire could find no place in his scheme of things. He lost no chance of assailing it with mockery and sarcasm made terrible by the earnestness of his purpose, until he came in many quarters to be regarded as the most inveterate antagonist the Church had ever known.

Yet among the great men of letters in France contemporary with Voltaire, the most part went immeasurably farther than he, and went in a different direction withal, for they denied the reality of Religion. Few of them, indeed, believed in the existence of God, or would have had anything to do with building a house of worship. It is related of David Hume that when dining once in a party of eighteen at the house of Baron d'Holbach, he expressed a doubt as to whether any person could anywhere be found to avow himself dogmatically an atheist. "Indeed, my dear sir," quoth the host, "you are this moment sitting at table with seventeen such persons." Among that group of philosophers were men of great intelligence and lofty purpose, such as D'Alembert, Diderot, HelvÚtius, Condorcet, Buffon, men with more of the real spirit of Christianity in their natures than could be found in half the churches of Christendom. The roots of their atheism were emotional rather than philosophical. It was part of the generous but rash and superficial impatience with which they disowned all connection whatever with a Church that had become subservient to so much that was bad. Their atheism was one of the fruits of the vicious policy which had suppressed Huguenotism in France; it was an early instance of what has since been often observed, that materialism and atheism are much more apt to flourish in Romanist than in Protestant countries. The form of religion which is already to some extent purified and rationalized awakens no such violent revulsion in free-thinking minds as the form that is more heavily encumbered with remnants of obsolete primitive thought. Moreover, the rationalizing religion of Protestant countries is commonly found in alliance with political freedom. In France under the Old RÚgime, the Catholic religion was stigmatized as an ally of despotism, as well as a congeries of absurd doctrines and ceremonies. The best minds felt their common sense shocked by it no less than their reason. No very deep thinking was done on the subject; their treatment of it was in general extremely shallow.

The forms which religious sentiment had assumed in the Middle Ages had become unintelligible; the most highly endowed minds were dead to the sublimity of Gothic architecture, and saw nothing but grotesque folly in Dante's poetry. They seriously believed that religious doctrines and ecclesiastical government were originally elaborate systems of fraud, devised by sagacious and crafty tyrants for the sole purpose of enslaving the multitude of mankind. No discrimination was shown. They were as ready to throw away belief in God as in the miracles of St. Columba, and to scout at the notion of a future life in the same terms as those in which they denounced the forged donation of Constantine. The flippant ease with which they disposed of the greatest questions, in crass ignorance of the very nature of the problem to be solved, was well illustrated in the remark of the astronomer Lalande, that he had swept the entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. A similar instance of missing the point was furnished about fifty years ago by the eminent physiologist Moleschott, when he exclaimed, "No thought without phosphorus," and congratulated himself that he had forever disposed of the human soul. I am inclined to think that those are the two remarks most colossal in their silliness that ever appeared in print.

Very different in spirit was the acute reply of Laplace when reminded by Napoleon that his great treatise on the dynamics of the solar system contained no allusion to God. "Sire," said Laplace, "I had no need of that hypothesis." This remark was profound in its truth, for it meant that in order to give a specific explanation of any single group of phenomena, it will not do to appeal to divine action, which is equally the source of all phenomena. Science can deal only with secondary causes. In the eighteenth century men of science were learning that such is the case; men like Diderot and D'Alembert had come to realize it, and they believed that the logical result was atheism. This was because the only idea of God which they had ever been taught to entertain was the Latin idea of a God remote from the world and manifested only through occasional interferences with the order of nature. When they dismissed this idea they declared themselves atheists. If they had been familiar with the Greek idea of God as immanent in the world and manifested at every moment through the orderly sequence of its phenomena, their conclusions would doubtless have been very different.

To these philosophers Voltaire's unshaken theism seemed a mere bit of eccentric conservatism. But along with that queer and intensely independent personality there went a stronger intellectual grasp and a more calm intellectual vision than belonged to any other Frenchman of the eighteenth century. In the facts of Nature, despite the lifeless piecemeal fashion in which they were then studied, Voltaire saw a rational principle at work which atheism could in nowise account for. To him the universe seemed full of evidences of beneficent purpose, and more than once he set forth with eloquence and power the famous argument from design, which is as old as Xenophon's Memorabilia, and which received its fullest development at the hands of Paley and the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises. There is thus yet another significance added to the little church at Ferney. Not only was it the sole church in France dedicated simply to God, and not only was its builder a layman hostile to ecclesiastical doctrines and methods, but he was almost alone among the eminent freethinkers of his age and country in believing in God and asserting the everlasting reality of religion.

It is therefore that I have cited Voltaire as a kind of text for the present discourse; for it is my purpose to show that, apart from all questions of revelation, the light of nature affords us sufficient ground for maintaining that religion is fundamentally true and must endure forever. It appears to me, moreover, that the materialism of the present day is merely a tradition handed down from the French writers whom Voltaire combated. When Moleschott made his silly remark about phosphorus, it was simply an inheritance of silliness from Lalande. When Haeckel tells us that the doctrine of evolution forbids us to believe in a future life, it is not because he has rationally deduced such a conclusion from the doctrine, but because he takes his opinions on such matters ready-made from Ludwig BŘchner, who is simply an echo of the eighteenth century atheist La Mettrie. We shall see that the doctrine of evolution has implications very different from what Haeckel supposes.

But first let me observe in passing that in the English-speaking world there has never been any such divorce between rationalism and religion as in France, and among the glories of English literature are such deeply reverent and profoundly philosophical writings as those of Hooker and Chillingworth, of Bishop Butler and Jonathan Edwards, and in our own time of Dr. Martineau. Nowhere in history, perhaps, have faith and reason been more harmoniously wedded together than in the history of English Protestantism. But the disturbance that affected France in the age of Voltaire now affects the whole Christian world, and every question connected with religion has been probed to depths of which the existence was scarcely suspected a century ago. One seldom, indeed, hears the frivolous mockery in which the old French writers dealt so freely; that was an ebullition of temper called forth by a tyranny that had come to be a social nuisance. The scepticism of our day is rather sad than frivolous; it drags people from long cherished notions in spite of themselves; it spares but few that are active-minded; it invades the church, and does not stop in the pews to listen but ascends the pulpit and preaches. There is no refuge anywhere from this doubting and testing spirit Of the age. In the attitude of civilized men towards the world in which we live, the change of front has been stupendous; the old cosmology has been overthrown in headlong ruin, attacks upon doctrines have multiplied, and rituals, creeds, and Scriptures are overhauled and criticised, until a young generation grows up knowing nothing of the sturdy faith of its grandfathers save by hearsay; for it sees everything in heaven and earth called upon to show its credentials.