ubt in which we both are, I do not say to you, with Pascal,
'choose the safest.' There is no safety in uncertainty. We are here not to
talk, but to examine; we must judge, and our judgment is not determined by
our will. I do not propose to you to believe extravagant things in order
to escape embarassment. I do not say to you, 'Go to Mecca, and instruct
yourself by kissing the black stone, take hold of a cow's tail, muffle
yourself in a scapulary, or be imbecile and fanatical to acquire the favor
of the Being of beings.' I say to you, 'Continue to cultivate virtue, to
be beneficent, to regard all superstition with horror, or with pity; but
adore, with me, the design which is manifested in all nature, and
consequently the author of that design--the primordial and final cause of
all; hope with me that our monade, which reasons on the great eternal
Being, may be happy through that same great Being. There is no
contradiction in this. You can no more demonstrate its impossibility than
I can demonstrate mathematically that it is so. In metaphysics we scarcely
reason on anything but probabilities. We are all swimming in a sea of
which we have never seen the shore. Woe be to those who fight while they
swim! Land who can; but he that cries out to me, "You swim in vain, there
is no land," disheartens me, and deprives me of all my strength. What is
the object of our dispute? To console our unhappy existence. Who consoles
it--you or I? You yourself own, in some passages of your work, that the
belief in a God has withheld some men on the brink of crime; for me this
acknowledgment is enough. If this opinion had prevented but ten
assassinations, but ten calumnies, but ten iniquitous judgments on the
earth, I hold that the whole earth ought to embrace it.' "--_Voltaire's
Philosophical Dictionary._

This Voltaire says: "The laws punished public crimes; it was necessary to
establish a check upon secret crimes; this check was to be found only in
religion." In the same article we find the following: "We are obliged to
hold intercourse and transact business and mix up in life with knaves
possessing little or no reflection; with vast numbers of persons addicted
to brutality, intoxication and rapine. You may, if you please, preach to
them that there is no hell, and that the soul of man is mortal. As for
myself, I will be sure to thunder in their ears that if they rob me they
will inevitably be damned." His true position upon the hell question is