scholars and educated men as his most probable audience, experience
ought certainly to have told him that whereas one can shoot such men
down with the heavy guns of scientific proof, but cannot make them
surrender, they may be got to capitulate all the more quickly before
"lightly equipped" measures of seduction. "Lightly equipped," and
"intentionally so," thus Strauss himself speaks of his own book. Nor
do his public eulogisers refrain from using the same expression in
reference to the work, as the following passage, quoted from one of
the least remarkable among them, and in which the same expression is
merely paraphrased, will go to prove:--

"The discourse flows on with delightful harmony: wherever it directs
its criticism against old ideas it wields the art of demonstration,
almost playfully; and it is with some spirit that it prepares the new
ideas it brings so enticingly, and presents them to the simple as well
as to the fastidious taste. The arrangement of such diverse and
conflicting material is well thought out for every portion of it
required to be touched upon, without being made too prominent; at
times the transitions leading from one subject to another are
artistically managed, and one hardly knows what to admire most--the
skill with which unpleasant questions are shelved, or the discretion
with which they are hushed up."

The spirit of such eulogies, as the above clearly shows, is not quite
so subtle in regard to judging of what an author is able to do as in
regard to what he wishes. What Strauss wishes, however, is best
revealed by his own emphatic and not quite harmless commendation of
Voltaire's charms, in whose service he might have learned precisely
those "lightly equipped" arts of which his admirer speaks--granting,
of course, that virtue may be acquired and a pedagogue can ever be a