A Greater Failure

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 31, 3 August 1905, Page 2

A Greater Failure

When Voltaire's remains were discovered in the vaults of the Pantheon (Paris) some years ago, a crowd of morbid sentimentalists crushed and jostled each other to get a glimpse of the dried bones. And the chronicler of the event declared that the skeleton face still sneered. Now there was more horse-power, and more malignant activity, in one lobe of Voltaire's brain, than in air the grey matter within the headpieces of a corporal's squad of men like Parkes and Stephens. The great French traitor, roue, and traducer of the saintly Maid of Orleans, waged a fierce war against the Church for half a century, till death cut short his wicked

career. ' I am tired,' said he, 4of being told that twelve men sufficed for the establishment of Christianity; and I l^ng to prove that only one is necessary to destroy it. 1 The i 4 Encyclopedic ' was written to 'crush the infamous one '—to wit, the Church. Falsehood, satire, and ridicule were the infantry, cavalry, and artillery, of Voltaire and his fellow-campaigners in their literary warfare against the Christian faith. ' One U obliged to lie,' said he in a letter to Diderot, ' and still one is persecuted for not having lied enough.' In the eightieth voUime of his ' Oeuvres Completes ' he writes* to another collaborator, Thiriot : ' Lying is a vice only when it does harm ; it is a very great virtue when it does good. Be, then, more virtuous than ever. You must lie like a devil— not timidly and for a time only, but boldly and always. . , Lie, my friends, lie. I will do a similar good turn when occasion offers,' Here we have the keynote to the character of Voltaire— tne summa sumtnae of bi-s ethics, his philosophy, his history — deliberate and unmitigated falsehood. Voltaire's bones are mouldering into dust beneath Tissot's great dome. But the Church goes marching along. Time is, indeed, the friend of truth. Truth crushed to earth shall ri6e again : The eternal years of God are hers ; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers,' Time is on the side of the Church, which is to endure till time shall be no more. Asid where intellectual giants like Voltaire and Rousseau and Bismarck have failed, Torn Thumb politicians out on the rim of the earth are not likely to succeed to any great extent.