him. SAMUEL: You are mistaken, unbeliever. God reproves you, your
sceptre will pass into other hands.

Perhaps no writer has ever roused more hatred in Christendom than
Voltaire. He was looked on as a sort of anti-Christ. That was natural;
his attacks were so tremendously effective at the time. But he has been
sometimes decried on the ground that he only demolished and made no
effort to build up where he had pulled down. This is a narrow complaint.
It might be replied that when a sewer is spreading plague in a town, we
cannot wait to remove it till we have a new system of drains, and it may
fairly be said that religion as practised in contemporary France was a
poisonous sewer. But the true answer is that knowledge, and therefore
civilization, are advanced by criticism and negation, as well as by
construction and positive discovery. When a man has the talent to attack
with effect falsehood, prejudice, and imposture, it is his duty, if
there are any social duties, to use it.

For constructive thinking we must go to the other great leader of French
thought,

[157] Rousseau, who contributed to the growth of freedom in a different
way. He was a deist, but his deism, unlike that of Voltaire, was
religious and emotional. He regarded Christianity with a sort of
reverent scepticism. But his thought was revolutionary and repugnant to
orthodoxy; it made against authority in every sphere; and it had an
enormous influence. The clergy perhaps dreaded his theories more than
the scoffs and negations of Voltaire. For some years he was a fugitive
on the face of the earth. Émile, his brilliant contribution to the
theory of education, appeared in 1762. It contains some remarkable pages
on religion, “the profession of faith of a Savoyard vicar,” in which the