TOLERATION
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
VOLTAIRE
TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
Joseph McCabe
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1912
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
INTRODUCTION
It seems useful, in presenting to English readersthis selection of the works of Voltaire, to recallthe position and personality of the writer and thecircumstances in which the works were written. Itis too lightly assumed, even by many who enjoy thefreedom which he, more than any, won for Europe,and who may surpass him in scepticism, that Voltaireis a figure to be left in a discreetly remoteniche of memory. “Other times, other manners”is one of the phrases he contributed to modernliterature. Let us genially acknowledge that heplayed a great part in dispelling the last mists ofthe Middle Ages, and politely attribute to the papalperversity and the lingering vulgarity of his agethe more effective features of his work. Thus hasVoltaire become a mere name to modern rationalists;a name of fading brilliance, a monumentalname, but nothing more.
This sentiment is at once the effect and the causeof a very general ignorance concerning Voltaire;and it is a reproach to us. We have time, amidincreasing knowledge, to recover the most obscurepersonalities of the Middle Ages and of antiquity;we trace the most elementary contributors to modernculture; and we neglect one of the mightiest forces[Pg iv]that made the development of modern culture possible.I do not speak of Voltaire the historian,who, a distinguished writer says, introduced historyfor the first time into the realm of letters; Voltairethe dramatist, whose name is inscribed for ever inthe temple of the tragic muse; Voltaire the physicist,who drove the old Cartesianism out of France, andimposed on it the fertile principles of Newton; Voltairethe social reformer, who talked to eighteenth-centurykings of the rights of man, and scourgedevery judicial criminal of his aristocratic age; Voltairethe cosmopolitan, who boldly set up England’sensign of liberty in feudal France. All these thingswere done by the “flippant Voltaire” of the flippantmodern preacher. But he can be considered hereonly as one of the few who, in an age of profoundinequality, used the privilege of his enlightenmentto enlighten his fellows; one of those who won forus that liberty to think rationally, and to speakfreely, on religious matters which we too airilyattribute to our new goddess, Evolution.
The position of Voltaire in the development ofreligious thought in Europe is unique. Even if hiswords had no application in our age, it merits themost grateful consideration. Trace to its sourcesthe spirit that has led modern France and modernPortugal to raise civic ideals above creeds, andthat will, within a few decades, find the same expressionin Spain, Italy, Belgium, and half ofAmerica. You find yourself in the first half of thenineteenth century, when, in all those countries, afew hundred men, and some women, maintained asuperb struggle with restored monarchs and restored[v]Jesuits for the liberty t