sordid pastors, roused his indignation and his pity, and these alternating emotions which first excited the spirit of inquiry, afterwards too much guided its course, we are not on that account to condemn him as severely as we should one who, from some personal spleen or individual interest, had suffered his judgment to be warped, and thus, as it were, lashed himself into disbelief of a system altogether pure administered by a simple, a disinterested, a venerable hierarchy.

Let us for a moment, independent of what may be termed the political view of the question-independent of all that regards the priesthood-consider the position of a person endowed with strong natural faculties, and not under the absolute dominion of his spiritual guides, nor prevented by their authority from exercising his reason; but, on the contrary, living at a moment when a spirit of free inquiry was beginning generally to prevail. He is told that the mystery of transubstantiation must be believed by him as a fact; he is told that there has been transmitted through a succession of ages from the apostles one of the Divine attributes, the power of pardoning sin, and that the laying a priest's hands on a layman gives him this miraculous power, to be exercised by him how guilty soever may be his own life, how absolutely null his own be lief in the Divine being-nay, that this power has come through certain persons notorious atheists themselves, and whose lives were more scandalously profligate than anything that a modest tongue can describe. Presented to a vigorous mind, and not enforced by an authority which suffers no reasoning, or if enforced yet vainly so enforced, these dogmas and these claims became the subject of discussion, and were rejected almost as soon as they were understood. But in company with them were found many other doctrines and pretensions of a very different complexion, yet all of them were pronounced to have the same Divine original; and no

greater sanctity, no higher authority, no deeper veneration was claimed for them than for the real presence of the Creator at the summons of the priest, or the participation of that priest in the attributes of the Godhead. Let us be just towards the youth who was placed in these circumstances, and let us not condemn him for hastily rejecting the wheat with the chaff, before we endeavour to place ourselves in the same situation, asking what effect would be produced on our minds by severe denunciations against us should we doubt the priest's power, or refuse an explicit assent to his dogmas, which our reason, nay our senses rejected, while he refused all access to the inspired volumes which contained, or were said to contain, their only warrant. Rejecting the false doctrines, the chances are many that Our faith would be shaken in the true. How many Protestants were made in the sixteenth century by the sale of indulgences! But how many unbelievers in Christianity have been made in all ages of the Church by the grosser errors of Rome, the exorbitant usurpations of her bishops, and the preposterous claims of her clergy.

It is also to be observed that Voltaire was, through his whole life, a sincere believer in the existence and attributes of the Deity. He was a firm and decided, and an openly declared unbeliever in Christianity, but he was, without any hesitation or any intermission, a theist. Then in examining the justice of the charge of blasphemy it is to be borne in mind that in all his numberless writings not one irreverent expression is to be found towards the Deity in whom he believed. He has more ably than most writers stated and illustrated the arguments in favour of that belief. He has consecrated some of his noblest poetry to celebrate the powers of the Godhead.* Whatever exception to this

* His dramatic compositions abound in such religious sentiments, clothed in the noblest language of poetical abstraction; but his celebrated verses, said to have been written extempore in a company that were admiring the

assertion may seem to be found in those writings will, on consideration, prove to be only apparent. It will be found that he is speaking only of the Deity as represented in systems of religion which he disbelieved; consequently he is there ridiculing only the idols, the work of men's hands, and the objects of superstitious worship, not the great Being in whom he believed and whom he adored. Even his Candide,' one of his greatest, perhaps his most perfect work; is only intended to expose the extravagance of the optimist doctrine; and however we may lament its tone in some sort, it is certainly not chargeable with ridiculing anything which a philosophic theist must necessarily believe.

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But no one can exempt Voltaire from blame for the manner in which he attacked religious opinions, and outraged the feelings of believers. There he is without defence. Had all men been prepared to make the step which he had himself taken, the wound he inflicted would have been inconsiderable. But he must have written with the absolute certainty that their religious belief would long survive his assaults, and that consequently, to the vast majority of readers, they could only give pain. Indeed he must, in the moments of calm reflection, have been aware that reasoning, and not ridicule, is the proper remedy for religious error, and that no one can heartily embrace the infidel side of the great question merely because he has been made to join in a laugh at the expense of absurdities mixed up with the doctrines of believers; nay, even if he has firmament one summer's evening, may be placed by the side of the finest compositions in that kind :

"Tous ces vastes pays d'azur et de lumière,
Tirés du sein du vide, formés sans matière,
Arrondis sans compas, tournans sans pivot,

N'ont à peine coûté la dépense d'un mot."

When I once cited these to my illustrious friend Monti, who never would allow any poetical merit to the French, he objected to the last phrase, which he called the pivot, as low and prosaic, and as affording a proof of his constant position that the French have no poetical language.

been drawn into a laugh at the expense of some portion of those doctrines themselves. It is no vindication for Voltaire against this heavy charge, but it may afford some palliation of his offence, if we reflect on the very great difference between the ecclesiastical regimen under which he lived, and that with which we are acquainted in our Protestant community. Let no man severely condemn the untiring zeal of Voltaire, and the various forms of attack which he employed without measure against the religious institutions of his country, who is not prepared to say that he could have kept entire possession of his own temper, and never cast an eye of suspicion upon the substance of a religion thus abused, nor ever have employed against its perversions the weapons of declamation and of mockery; had he lived under the system which regarded Alexander Borgia as one of its spiritual guides, which bred up and maintained in all the riot of criminal excess an aristocracy having for one branch of its resources the spoils of the altar, which practised persecution as a favourite means of conviction, and cast into the flames a lad of eighteen, charged with laughing as its priests passed by. Such dreadful abuses were present to Voltaire's mind when he attacked the Romish superstitions, and exposed the profligacy, as well as the intolerance, of clerical usurpation. He unhappily suffered them to poison his mind upon the whole of that religion of which these were the abuse; and, when his zeal waxed hot against the whole system, it blinded him to the unfairness of the weapons with which he attacked both its evidences and its teachers.

The doctrine upon toleration, upon prosecutions for infidelity, even for blasphemy, which I have now ventured to propound, is supported by the very highest authority among persons of the most acknowledged piety, and of the warmest zeal for the interests of religion. It was the constant maxim of my revered friend, Mr. Wilberforce, that no man should be prosecuted for

his attacks upon religion. He gave this opinion in Parliament; and he was wont to say, that the ground of it was his belief in the truths of religion. "If religion be, as I believe it, true, it has nothing to fear from any such assaults. But it may be injured by the secular arm interfering." Just so the well-known Ďuke of Queensberry, when conversing upon the writings of Paine, and other assailants of the constitution, made answer to a sycophant, who said of those attacks, "And so false too."-"No," said his Grace, “not at all: they are true, and that is their danger, and the reason I desire to see them put down by the law; were they false, I should not mind them at all."

In the like spirit we have the unsuspected testimony of men like Dr. Lardner and Bishop Jeremy Taylor, Christians whose piety and virtue, and whose orthodoxy, are beyond all suspicion :-"The proper punishment," says Lardner, "of a low, mean, indecent, scurrilous way of writing, seems to be neglect, contempt, scorn, and final indignation." (Letter to the Bishop of Chester on the Prosecution of Woolston, 1729).—"Blasphemy" (says Taylor) "is in aliena republica, a matter of another world. You may as well cure the colic by brushing a man's clothes, or fill a man's belly with a syllogism, as prosecute for blasphemy. Some men have believed it the more as being provoked into a confidence and vexed into a resolution. Force in matters of opinion can do no good, but is very apt to do hurt; for no man can change his opinion when he will. But if a man cannot change his opinion when he list, nor ever does heartily or resolutely but when he cannot do otherwise, then to use force may make him a hypocrite, but never to be a right believer; and so, instead of erecting a trophy to God and true religion, we build a monument for the devil." (Liberty of Prophesying, s. xiii. 19.)-Bishop Warburton says plainly, "he should have been ashamed of even projecting to write in defence of Moses had he not thought that all infidels