great deal of the thought which, manipulated by brilliant writers on the
other side of the Channel, captured the educated classes in France. We
are now in the age of Voltaire. He was a convinced deist. He considered
that the nature of the universe proved that it was made by a conscious
architect, he held that God was required in the interests of conduct,
and he ardently combated atheism. His great achievements were his
efficacious labour in the cause of toleration, and his systematic
warfare against superstitions. He was profoundly influenced by English
thinkers, especially Locke and Bolingbroke. This statesman had concealed
his infidelity during his lifetime except from his intimates; he had
lived long as an exile in France; and his rationalistic essays were
published (1754) after his death. Voltaire, whose literary genius
converted the work of the English thinkers into a world-force, did not
begin his campaign against Christianity till after the middle of the
century, when superstitious practices and religious persecutions were
becoming a scandal in his country. He assailed the Catholic Church in
every field with ridicule and satire. In a little work called The Tomb
of Fanaticism (written 1736,

[154] published 1767), he begins by observing that a man who accepts his
religion (as most people do) without examining it is like an ox which
allows itself to be harnessed, and proceeds to review the difficulties
in the Bible, the rise of Christianity, and the course of Church
history; from which he concludes that every sensible man should hold the
Christian sect in horror. “Men are blind to prefer an absurd and
sanguinary creed, supported by executioners and surrounded by fiery
faggots, a creed which can only be approved by those to whom it gives
power and riches, a particular creed only accepted in a small part of
the world—to a simple and universal religion.” In the Sermon of the
Fifty and the Questions of Zapata we can see what he owed to Bayle and