the only threads of light in the dark web of his history are clerical
and theurgic, not lay and human. Voltaire is the very experimentum
crucis of this ugly fact. European history looks to him what it
would have looked to his Jesuit preceptors, had the sacerdotal
element in it been wanting; what heathen history actually did look to
them. He eliminates the sacerdotal element, and nothing remains but
the chaos of apes and wolves which the Jesuits had taught him to
believe was the original substratum of society. The humanity of his
history--even of his 'Pucelle d'Orleans,--is simply the humanity of
Sanchez and the rest of those vingtquatre Peres who hang gibbeted for
ever in the pages of Pascal. He is superior to his teachers,
certainly, in this, that he has hope for humanity on earth; dreams of
a new and nobler life for society, by means of a true and scientific
knowledge of the laws of the moral and material universe; in a word,
he has, in the midst of all his filth and his atheism, a faith in a
righteous and truth-revealing God, which the priests who brought him
up had not. Let the truth be spoken, even though in favour of such a
destroying Azrael as Voltaire. And what if his primary conception of
humanity be utterly base? Is that of our modern historians so much
higher? Do Christian men seem to them, on the whole, in all ages, to
have had the spirit of God with them, leading them into truth,
however imperfectly and confusedly they may have learnt his lessons?

Have they ever heard with their ears, or listened when their fathers
have declared unto them, the noble works which God did in their days,
and in the old time before them? Do they believe that the path of
Christendom has been, on the whole, the path of life and the right
way, and that the living God is leading her therein? Are they proud
of the old British worthies? Are they jealous and tender of the
reputation of their ancestors? Do they believe that there were any