ts of the Unknowable, this world would now be a veritable paradise.
It is Theology that has barred the entrance to Eden, by diverting the
attention of men from this world to another. Heaven is Here.

All religious denominations now dimly perceive the trend of the times,
and are gradually omitting theology from their teachings and taking on
ethics and sociology instead. A preacher is now simply Society's walking
delegate. We are evolving theology out and sociology in. Theology has
ever been the foe of progress and the enemy of knowledge. It has
professed to know all and has placed a penalty on advancement. The Age
of Enlightenment will not be here until every church has evolved into a
schoolhouse, and every priest is a pupil as well as a teacher.

VOLTAIRE

We are intelligent beings; and intelligent beings can not have been
formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some
difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's
intelligence came from some greater Intelligence.

--_The Philosophical Dictionary_

[Illustration: VOLTAIRE]

The man, Francois Marie Arouet, known to us as Voltaire (which name he
adopted in his twenty-first year), was born in Paris in Sixteen Hundred
Ninety-four. He was the second son in a family of three children. During
his babyhood he was very frail; in childhood sickly and weak; and
throughout his whole life he suffered much from indigestion and
insomnia.

In all the realm of writers no man ever had a fuller and more active
career, touching life at so many points, than Voltaire.

The first requisite in a long and useful career would seem to be, have
yourself born weak and cultivate dyspepsia, nervousness and insomnia.
Whether or not the good die young is still a mooted question, but
certainly the athletic often do. All those good men and true, who at
grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager,
and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves,
and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive,
dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years,
strew sweet myrtle, thyme and mignonette.

Voltaire died of an accident--too much Four-o'Clock--cut off in his
prime, when life for him was at its brightest and best, aged
eighty-three.

The only evidence we have that the mind of Voltaire failed at the last
came from