t, les corps de ceux qui en doutent.

Nor was it only 'M. Loke' whom he felt himself obliged to touch so
gingerly; the remarkable movement towards Deism, which was then
beginning in England, Voltaire only dared to allude to in a hardly
perceivable hint. He just mentions, almost in a parenthesis, the names
of Shaftesbury, Collins, and Toland, and then quickly passes on. In this
connexion, it may be noticed that the influence upon Voltaire of the
writers of this group has often been exaggerated. To say, as Lord Morley
says, that 'it was the English onslaught which sowed in him the seed of
the idea ... of a systematic and reasoned attack' upon Christian
theology, is to misjudge the situation. In the first place it is certain
both that Voltaire's opinions upon those matters were fixed, and that
his proselytising habits had begun, long before he came to England.
There is curious evidence of this in an anonymous letter, preserved
among the archives of the Bastille, and addressed to the head of the
police at the time of Voltaire's imprisonment.

Vous venez de mettre a la Bastille [says the writer, who, it is
supposed, was an ecclesiastic] un homme que je souhaitais y voir il
y a plus de 15 annees.

The writer goes on to speak of the

metier que faisait l'homme en question, prechant le deisme tout a
decouvert aux toilettes de nos jeunes seigneurs ... L'Ancien
Testament, selon lui, n'est qu'un tissu de contes et de fables, les
apotres etaient de bonnes gens idiots, simples, et credules, et les
peres de l'Eglise, Saint Bernard surtout, auquel il en veut le
plus, n'etaient que des charlatans et des suborneurs.

'Je voudrais etre homme d'authorite,' he adds, 'pour un jour seulement,
afin d'enfermer ce poete entre quatre murailles pour toute sa vie.' That
Voltaire at this early date should have already given rise to such pious
ecclesiastical wishes shows clearly enough that he had little to learn
from the deists of England. And, in the second place, the deists of
England had very little to teach a disciple of Bayle, Fontenelle, and
Montesquieu. They were, almost without exception, a group of second-rate
and insignificant writers whose 'onslaught' upon current beliefs was
only to a faint extent 'systematic and reasoned.' The feeble and
fluctuating rationalism of Toland and Wollaston, the crude and confused
rationalism of Collins, the half-crazy rationalism of Woolston, may each
and al