order. This plan gave
Voltaire complete freedom both in the choice of subjects and in their
manipulation; as the spirit seized him he could fly out into a page of
sarcasm or speculation or criticism or buffoonery, and such liberty was
precisely to his taste; so that the book which had first appeared as a
pocket dictionary--'ce diable de portatif', he calls it in a letter
proving quite conclusively that _he_, at any rate, was not responsible
for the wretched thing--were there not Hebrew quotations in it? and who
could accuse him of knowing Hebrew?--had swollen to six volumes before
he died.

The subjects of these writings were very various. Ostensibly, at least,
they were by no means limited to matters of controversy. Some were
successful tragedies, others were pieces of criticism, others were
historical essays, others were frivolous short stories, or _vers de
societe_. But, in all of them, somewhere or other, the cloven hoof was
bound to show itself at last. Whatever disguises he might assume,
Voltaire in reality was always writing for his 'convent'; he was
pressing forward, at every possible opportunity, the great movement
against the old regime. His attack covers a wide ground. The abuses of
the financial system, the defects in the administration of justice, the
futility of the restraints upon trade--upon these and a hundred similar
subjects he poured out an incessant torrent of gay, penetrating,
frivolous and remorseless words. But there was one theme to which he was
perpetually recurring, which forms the subject for his bitterest jests,
and which, in fact, dominates the whole of his work, 'Ecrasez l'infame!'
was his constant exclamation; and the 'infamous thing' which he wished
to see stamped underfoot was nothing less than religion. The
extraordinary fury of his attack on religion has, in the eyes of many,
imprinted an indelible stigma upon his name; but the true nature of his
position in this matter has often been misunderstood, and deserves some
examination.

Voltaire was a profoundly irreligious man. In this he resembled the
majority of his contemporaries; but he carried the quality perhaps to a
further pitch than any man of his age. For, with him, it was not merely
the purely religious and mystical feelings that were absent; he lacked
all sympathy with those vague, brooding, emotional states of mind which
go to create the highest forms of poetry, music, and art, and which are
called forth into such a moving i