Part 4 (1/2)
Par. Lost, Bk. I.
Born in Paris of a mother whose loose morals made her a by-word to all who knew her, he imbibed at her breast that appet.i.te for lawlessness and iniquity which ruled him to the last hour. His mother dying during his infancy, he became the protege of an abbe who had abandoned the duties of his sacred calling for the allurements of the world. In his boyhood he was sent to the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand, where the perversity of his character manifested itself to such an extent that one of his teachers prophesied that he would one day become the coryphee of deism.
Thereafter his career was one of unlicensed depravity. More than once he was arrested and cast into prison; he had reason to hate the Bastille, for he himself had experienced the life of a criminal therein.
[Ill.u.s.tration: VOLTAIRE.]
That writer was not far wrong who a.s.serted that irreligion is but one form of the insanity which is born of immoral living. It is remarkable in the anti-Christian literature of all times, and of none more than our own, that its heroes and heroines are the abandoned roues and harlots who, having defiled the temples of their own bodies, seek to carry the abomination of desolation into the holy places of G.o.d. In this matter Voltaire was no exception. His immoral life was lived ostentatiously and boastingly. We will not, however, enter upon a list of the criminal observances of this man, preferring to leave such details to their proper place. It will be sufficient to point out the purpose that underlay all the actions and words of his life. This purpose is best indicated by citations from his letters and other written works.
His hatred for the Church and for morality is clearly displayed in the works that he gave forth during the later years of his life. In his _Age of Louis XIV._, a work that has been made an obligatory text book in the educational establishments subject to the University of France, we find pa.s.sages full of insinuations and falsehoods directed against the Holy See. ”The Pope's spiritual authority,” he says, ”is now destroyed and abhorred in one-half of Christendom; and if in the other half he is regarded as a father, he has children who sometimes properly and successfully resist him.” Again he a.s.serts: ”To swear fidelity to any other than one's own sovereign is high treason in a layman; in the cloister it is an act of religion.” He terms the Pope ”the foreign sovereign.” His _Pucelle_ is a diabolical attempt to besmirch the pure character of Joan of Arc. It was a work, however, which excited so much disgust in all circles that Voltaire endeavored at first to disclaim it, and it was many years before the whole poem could venture forth with his authorization. The high society that could welcome its foetid pages was already ripe for the horrors of the Revolution.
From 1760 to the end of his life Voltaire a.s.sumed as his motto the impious expression: _Ecra.s.sez l'infame_, ”crush the infamous thing,”
intending thereby to indicate Christ and His Church. Throughout all these years the term appears constantly in his own and his disciples'
letters. How he revels in his insane and satanic hatred, hardly finding words that can fitly convey his utter aversion for the things of G.o.d!
The Christian religion he proclaims ”an abominable hydra, a monster which a hundred hands must destroy.” He bids the philosophers scour the streets to destroy it ”as missionaries journey over land and sea to propagate it.” He bids them dare everything even to being burned in order to destroy Christianity. Again he calls upon his fawning admirers to annihilate Christianity, to hunt it down, to vilify it, to ruin it.
The perusal of his works leaves one with the impression that Voltaire was constantly troubled with a nightmare, in the effort to free himself from which he emitted his lugubrious wailings.
In 1778 the mob of Paris united to crown him at the Theatre Francais.
Referring to these manifestations the impious one wrote: ”My entry into Paris was more triumphant than that of Jesus into Jerusalem.” The further work of Voltaire was in accordance with expressions like these.
His intimacy with Frederic II., of Prussia afforded the blasphemer many opportunities of indulging his satanic impulses. Among the anti-Christian sophists who made the Palace of Berlin their rendezvous was a school of Freemasons who had already begun to celebrate the final downfall of the Papacy. For the more rapid realization of this hope various expedients were advocated, among them being the pet resort of irreligious tyrants,--the abolition of the monastic orders, a project which found its foremost exponent in Voltaire.
Such was the man to whom anti-Christianism looks up, as to its great and original patriarch, a man utterly devoid of the human moral sense, a man to whom all that savored of the good or virtuous was an abomination and a thing of infamy, a man whose methods of deceit are expressed in his own words: ”Lying is a vice only when it harms. You ought to lie like the devil, not timidly or once only, but boldly, and all the time. Lie, lie! my friends, and some of it will be sure to stick.” From his works anti-Christianism took the chief formulas of its creed, and following in the footsteps of its master, it has performed deeds worthy of his approbation.
Close in line with the irreligion of Voltaire was the work of Denis Diderot, the founder of the infamous _Encyclopaedia_, a huge ma.s.s of calumny against the religion of Christ, abounding in falsification of history, in doctrines inviting to immorality of life and subversion of all lawfully const.i.tuted authority. The poison of the _Encyclopaedia_ was quickly a.s.similated by the aristocratic element of Paris. At first the salons, those rendezvous of the higher cla.s.ses, took up the work, and by their discussions gave it a tone. It was highly acceptable to a social order, at that time immoral and impious to a degree; but its venom gradually overflowed to the ma.s.ses, ever eager to imitate the excesses of the great.
The efforts of the leaders of irreligion were ably seconded by the various systems that arose towards the close of the eighteenth century, as so many developments of Deism and the wors.h.i.+p of nature. The Sensationalists, under the tutelage of La Metrie, Condillac, Helvetius, and Holback, would make of man a mere machine, more ingeniously organized than the brutes; thought was reduced to a mere physical operation of the human body; hence the negation of the spiritual world, the spiritual soul, and the hope of immortality. The Rationalists in Germany led to disbelief in the inspiration and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. Pantheism, Agnosticism, Idealism, and a thousand and one like branches of error, sprang forth from the revolt of the earlier sophists, all contributing their part to inflame and destroy the souls of men, and leading them on by sure steps to final anarchy. The very multiplicity of such sophistic theories, arising amidst the darkness of anti-Christian night, like the constantly changing figures in a kaleidoscope, were but the ghosts of a hideous phantasmagoria, that, scarcely seen, resolved themselves into something more strange and more appalling. It was the gathering of the spirits of iniquity for the grand a.s.sault upon the City of G.o.d.
_FREEMASONRY._
Prominent among the subversive forces of the eighteenth century was that of Freemasonry and its kindred a.s.sociations. As to its real origin but little is known. The modern order seems to have taken its rise in England in the year 1717, its first const.i.tution appearing in 1723. The new a.s.sociation spread with remarkable rapidity over the Continent, founding its lodges in Berlin, Leipzig, Brunswick, Naples, Paris, and other places, before the middle of the century. On its first appearance it was denounced as subversive of government, and as a peril to the social order. The members of which it was composed were men of evil omen, Voltaire, Condorcet, Volney, Laland, Mirabeau, Frederic II., and the like. Pope Clement XII., in his Const.i.tution, _In Eminenti_, of 1738, condemned the order. Thereby all who should join a Masonic lodge, a.s.sist at any Masonic a.s.sembly, or have any connection with the sect, were _ipso facto_ excommunicated. Benedict XIV., in 1751, issued the Bull, _Provides_, renewing the decrees of his predecessor, and giving many cogent reasons for his act.
The deep secrecy which involved all the operations of regular Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was not so closely guarded in one of the independent forms of its spirit, known as the Society of the Illuminati. The founder of this order was Adam Weishaupt, a professor of ecclesiastical law at Ingolstadt. The end of this secret society, and the purpose which was to dominate it, was clearly the overthrow of all existing social and religious inst.i.tutions. The statutes exacted from the members a blind obedience. Instead of works of devotion, prayer-books and the lives of the saints, it prescribed for its devotees the works of the ancient pagan authors or modern books of a similar description; its books of religion comprised such t.i.tles as: _The System of Nature_ and the works of Rousseau.
The new order gained many disciples even among the crowned heads, who were slow to perceive that the very spirit of the organization was centred in hatred of the throne as well as of religion. As soon as the real nature and purposes of the _Illuminati_ became known, efforts were at once made by the civil authorities for their suppression. In this they were aided greatly by the inevitable dissensions introduced into the order in the course of time. In 1784 all secret societies, communities, and confraternities, were prohibited in Bavaria. In 1785 Weishaupt was expelled from Ingolstadt, and after many wanderings finally found refuge with the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. Before his death he had the good fortune to repent and was reconciled with the Church. The order, everywhere fallen into disfavor, was gradually either disbanded, or incorporated into the other forms of the Masonry of the times. Its influence, however, like that of Freemasonry, remained, and was exerted with great vigor in the unhappy events that began in the year 1789.
_NEO-PAGANISM._
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the youth of Europe, and especially of France, educated to admire merely natural virtue, enamored of the ideal beauty and of the political and civil inst.i.tutions of other times, found in their schools a spirit of paganism. Little in touch with the true spirit of Christianity, it was easily led by the glamor of resounding phrases and cla.s.sical figures. These cla.s.sical studies, in which the excellent and virtuous teachers of the time found only literary and philological exercises, became through the evil influence of outside doctrinaires a subtle poison to the young mind, and brought to a point that rage for pagan antiquity which formed one of the most dangerous and misleading features of anti-Christianism.
From the time of the Reformation heterodoxy had sought its weapons in antiquity, whose uncertainty and obscurity could easily provide material for the desolating revolt against Christian authority. Machiavelli had already denounced modern Christianity as the cause of popular and national decadence; politicians lost themselves in adoration of the Greeks and Romans; to the sophists everything was grand and n.o.ble, in as far as it was pagan, everything was barbarous in as far as it receded from the ancient type. It was one of the methods of the war of impiety: anti-Christianism had need of antiquity as a mantle to cover its emptiness: it felt it must needs seek aid in the names of celebrated pagans, and thus strengthened, it might dare to abandon the Christian era, and take refuge around a Roman or Greek civilization resurrected and placed in a position of honor. Cla.s.sical education unconsciously aided in this mode of warfare, and while the school teacher, with the best of intentions in the world, taught his pupils to admire the great beauties of the cla.s.sical authors, without attending to the false principles and doctrines, intended for a social order entirely different from the Christian, there were not wanting those who profited by these studies to lead the pupil to a love of the pagan philosophy therein contained. By their efforts the Roman and Greek world was held up as the only condition that could provide true happiness, the only political society worthy of man.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LOUIS XV.]
Throughout the whole reign of Louis XV. this mania for paganism invaded every part of society, so that when Louis XVI. ascended the throne, he found it dominant not only in literature, but in art and in life itself.
It was reflected in the corruption of the Court, in the sensual epicurism of the people, in the very manners of those whose ecclesiastical dignity ought to lead to more modern types of excellence.