plan? At life's dawn they took the position they held until the end, thus early facing in different directions! What if their circumstances in infancy had been entirely reversed? Is it a thought to be entertained that, in that case, their work in life might have been interchanged? It is hard to admit such a thing even in thought. Yet, even Voltaire is not, as some seem to suppose, entirely undeserving of any Christian charity. Different influences during his early years might have made him a wholly different man.

We find in each case the tendency begotten in these early years confirmed by every subsequent step. Voltaire entered college. A thorough course of university study might have developed in him some steadfastness of purpose; but there was no hand to bend him to this, so he soon left his studies for something more congenial. Then we find him in a law school, which he very soon abandoned. At eighteen he is attached to the French Embassy in Holland. Here a foolish amour of youth brought him into disgrace, and he returned to Paris, to become the clerk of an advocate. From this position he was cast into the Bastile, unjustly it must be said, for the severe criticism of the reign of Louis XIV., with the writing of which he was charged, was actually the creation of another. At that time the reward which France gave to mental competency was imprisonment. This tribute was awarded to the brilliant youth of twenty years, because he was thought to be the only person capable of producing the witty and scathing criticism so offensive to the court.

A year of imprisonment would silence and discourage for ever any average youth of the age of Voltaire. We have seen children pushing corks into water in the effort

to sink them. Voltaire was a cork. He sprang irrepressibly to the surface. He was, to change the figure, better prepared than ever to smite right and left with a blade that pierced as well as flashed. In prison he wrote the dramatic piece which gave him his first taste of literary fame. After this he found more eyes turned upon him than ever before. He had struck a spring which sent him higher than any other. He had never experienced any such gratification. The vanity and selfishness of his undisciplined nature had found their convenient food in the praise given to brilliant literary achievements. As far as he could be confirmed in any decision, his mind. was now fixed upon a literary

career.

A few years later he drew upon himself the ire of a distinguished statesman, and was rewarded with six months more in the Bastile. On his escape he fled to England, under sentence of banishment from France, and there remained three years. Here he noted the liberties enjoyed by the English people, and their participation in the affairs of government, in strong contrast with the state of things prevailing in France; and from this he drew inspiration in his assaults upon the government of the latter country. Here he met the English deists, Bolingbroke, Collins, Tyndal, and Wollaston. Here he learned enough of English to read Shakespeare, and to ridicule and steal from his writings. To the last fact may justly be attributed the highest excellence of his own dramatic productions. The intercourse with the English school of freethinkers is claimed by his friends to have led him into open fidelity. It is plain that we come nearer the truth when we say that his tendencies in the direction of unbelief, already strong, led him to seek out these

men as his most congenial companions. But the intercourse certainly confirmed every thing in him that was before base and unworthy.

The

Let us now follow Wesley through the same critical period of youth. Wesley bows to the same vigorous, religious discipline that met him almost at the gates of life, and bends the energies of his opening mind upon the prescribed course of study at Oxford. foundation was laid for a broad and ripe scholarship; he had formed the habit of steadfast application to one purpose; and he was prepared to find in the Church of Christ the agency for the elevation of the human race, with which end his whole nature was in thorough sympathy.

There are those who constantly assume that infidelity, liberalism, freethought, have all the learning and culture; and that Christianity is ignorant, narrow, prejudiced. It is worth while, at this point, to note how far this view is sustained by the contrast now under study. As to Voltaire's scholarship, it is difficult to understand how one who in youth could never be kept long under the restraints of school discipline could apply himself to study with the devotion that achieves success. And it is a notorious fact that he did not. After three years in England he could not write intelligently a letter in the language of that land. And his writings, which yet exist, attest that he had no high claim to scholarship in the fields of history and philosophy. He was never, in any sense, an exact, profound, or greatly learned man.

But in contrast, Wesley's claim to scholarship has never been put in question. Few men better meet the standard which Lord Brougham set up, in saying that a truly learned an is one who knows something

about everything, and everything about something. Here then we find the stability, and the learning, with the capacity of true research, on the side of Christianity; and the ignorance, and flippancy, and pretence, on the side of infidelity. There are, doubtless, exceptions on both sides; but we may rest assured that, as between Wesley and Voltaire so generally stands the question between Christianity and infidelity, as to learning and ignorance-deep culture and superficial display. The leading characters, as well as the followers, on both sides, to-day, furnish the same contrast.

Voltaire had not the steadiness of application, nor the knowledge which would have rendered him capable of a patient and thorough examination of the claims of Christianity to man's confidence. To ridicule what, at first glance, appeared weak in it was as much as his powers could do. And no more have his followers to-day those gifts of intellectual culture and the patient research to which Christianity reveals the unmistakable marks of its divine paternity; and if without these attainments, men are likewise destitute of heart, it is not easy to see how they can be anything but infidels. But Wesley, like Paul and Luther, could receive Christianity alike in the claims it addressed to the intellect and to the heart. The consequence was that his faith had been nourished at deep fountains, never known to the aspiring Frenchman. His soul had touched the Deity, and after that he was prepared to pursue his chosen path though a blaspheming world withstood him.

If we would rightly appreciate these men, Voltaire and Wesley, and their life-work, we must take into account as a controlling influence the condition of the two nations to which they belonged. During the reign of Louis XIV.,

A

under the masterly manipulation of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, the government of France had become a most perfectly organized machine, all-pervading in its touch, and reaching more intimately into the affairs of the individual and of private life than the world has ever seen elsewhere. The old, oppressive feudal relations, like iron chains, still bound the people. A man was not of nearly so much consequence as the lapdog of some lady of the court. It was the grand Louis who said, "L'etat, c'est moi," "The State-it is I." And he had no more liberal thought than that every person, and thing, and right in the land should be subservient to his personal pleasure. If the people were worse than slaves, that was to his thought their providential destiny. The people, the toiling masses, had no influence whatever in the affairs of the nation; but they paid all the

taxes.

When the premonitory thunders of the coming revolution began to be heard in the distance, when the only history of the period was continual deficits in the revenue, Turgot, the brave and trusted minister of finance, proposed to tax the nobility and clergy the same as other ranks, in order to raise a revenue. But a great tempest of indignation and astonishment arose, and when it had passed, Turgot no longer had control of the finances. Why, these grand people asked, what was the use of being noble if they must pay taxes like other men? Life would not be worth having. These classes wished, as had been the habit in the past, to be maintained in luxury and idleness by the toil, and sweat, and tears, and hunger, and blood, of the despised millions. He would be in sympathy with all tyrannies who could not sympathize with Voltaire's abhor

rence of the French Government, and even with the polished shafts his wit hurled against it.

Then there was the Church, degraded and demoralized beyond what is credible to men who live

to-day. It was bankrupt in religious principle and conviction; its chief guides were so vicious in life that no statement of their sins could be a slander; it was the nurse of the rankest superstitions; it ruled by judgments formed never in reason, but always in prejudice; it held over the minds of all men the darkening terrors of unspeakable torment, "burning ever, consuming never," for every act of disobedience to its authority. Within its pale, or without, individual thought was infidelity, and manly, independent action was a crime!

Of the religious ignorance of the day one instance will furnish a striking illustration. The Baron de Breteuil was the reader-the literary man-the learned member of the court of Louis XIV. At dinner one day a gay lady ventured a wager that he could not tell who was the author of the Lord's prayer. Now, as he did not go to dinners prepared to pass an examination, his answer was not ready; but pretty soon a lawyer sitting near him whispered in his ear, and then the learned Baron brought up the subject again, and said with becoming dignity that he supposed every one knew that Moses was the author of the Lord's Prayer!

Now, in another condition of things, would France have given to the world just the same Voltaire it did give? Did not the abuses of the age both merit and inspire the pitiless hailstorm of mockery and satire poured indiscriminately against Government, and Church, and society? Here, then, we must find one factor of great importance

in calculating the influences that made this Frenchman the man he

was.

The very different state of things in the British nation was one element in determining Wesley's great career. Such a government as that of France would no doubt have tempted an assault from such a man as Wesley. But the long-continued conflict of the English people against the feudal impositions was just about at an end. The career of unparalleled prosperity upon which England entered during the twenty years' administration of Robert Walpole was by this time at its height. The population of the country had been growing with unprecedented rapidity under the stimulus of great material prosperity. A country village arose as if by magic into a town, and towns were swollen into great cities. Artisans from the loom, and forge, and mine, were peopling the lone valley and silent moor.

But the Established Church, not to be compared with that of France at the same time, was in no sense awake to its responsibilities to these crowding multitudes. The parish churches had been built for a far less numerous generation. They were wholly inadequate to the demands of the time. It never occurred to the pleasure-loving clergy that a work of Church extension would regenerate the kingdom. They read their stately services, and their diluted sermons, with a due regard to the proprieties of the sanctuary; but no enkindling passion ever thrilled the hearts of the living men who heard. Among these neglected people came Wesley with a heart throbbing with passionate feeling and sympathy; and with him, and after him, came plain men of the people, whose utterances were all aflame with intense feeling, and their sermons were as firebrands among the

standing corn. And these newly arising conditions of life in the nation had as much to do with the far-reaching influence of his work, and its permanency, as the abuses in the French Church and State had to do with the gaining for Voltaire the ear of France.

But why, under these conditions of society, so much alike in the two nations, and yet in other respects so different, should Voltaire become the rampant infidel, and Wesley the devoted evangelist? The later was, in his way, as much at variance with the Established Church of England as the former with that of France. He saw selfishness, idleness, vice, and contempt of doctrine and morality in leading ecclesiastics as well as Voltaire. All around him, in England as in France, he saw the many neglected by the teachers of religion; without the encouragement in life and the comforting support in death which Christianity alone could give. The Church was but a means for the aggrandisement of the few. But his plan was to seek purification from within rather than to employ scourging from without. Whips never yet cured a fever, but internal remedies have often aided a patient. Voltaire used the whips, Wesley the internal remedies.

And yet more, if abuse should ever drive an man into extremes, Wesley had this reason beyond anything Voltaire ever knew. His name was always regarded as a mark for satire, contempt, falsehood, without foundation or qualification, from great magnates in Church and State, as well as from blaspheming ruffians, drivelling drunkards, and foul libertines. It has yet to appear that this black hailstorm of causeless calumny ever led him to swerve in the least degree from his appointed course.

The fact is, and explanation or apology can never alter it, that

Voltaire brought to his times a bad heart, and through it looked upon all that he criticised, and was influenced by it in some degree in all that he said and did. Hence circumstances similar to those that made Wesley a laborious evangelist made him a fierce-mouthed infidel.

It is not the design of this paper to trace in detail the events in the life of either of these men, the present plan being principally a study of influences. But the character of Voltaire's work cannot be properly estimated without considering the influence upon himself of his social relations. With women his intercourse was as depraved as even dissolute France would allow.

Frederick the Great of Prussia had a not uncommon weakness-he thought he could write poetry, Contemplating the benefits of mutual criticism, he cultivated Voltaire, and brought him to the palace at Berlin. But incessant praise was the only condition of friendship with this vain man, and this was more than a great king could consistently give to a subject, so they soon quarrelled. This polished light of the French world of literature stole some of the king's original poetry, for which he was arrested at Frankfort. He then applied himself to the writing up of Frederick's private life, and so clothed it with falsehood that Carlyle protests in bitterness against so great a wrong to his loved hero.

A good deal has been said and written about the style of Voltaire's infidelity. We are told he was not an atheist, because he once said that faith in the existence of God was so necessary that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent one. Such a statement seems at first sight to indicate a very exacting theism indeed; but examined more closely, it really means nothing at all. A belief in God is

necessary. But the demands of that necessity would be fully met by an invented god. But it is not necessary to invent such a god, because there is one already existing in the prejudices of the faithful. The language quoted to prove that he was not an atheist, looked at in its true significance, shows that he had no strong conviction at all of the existence of God.

Much has been made of the fact that he built a Christian church at Fernay, which he dedicated to God. This is certainly true. He purchased a house there. The old church interrupted his view, and was altogether unsightly. He tore it down, with consent of the civil authorities, and built a new one. That fact will not do much to establish for him a Christian character.

Nor yet will another-the fact that he was offered a cardinal's hat. Who offered it? Madame Pompadour, the accomplished courtesan who ruled Louis XV., and, therefore, the court and all France. But as she was not an ecclesiastical authority, a doubt may be stated as to her ability to secure this dignity for Voltaire upon his acceptance; but it is very likely from the way things were done at that time that she could. However, he declined the honour, undoubtedly not on the ground of consistency, but because of his deep-seated and ever-growing malignity towards the Church.

But the controlling feature of his infidelity was hatred of Christ. This was, no doubt, intensified by his contempt of the priesthood, who censured and opposed him. Him he cursed; them he stung in words of burning sarcasm. His assaults upon the Bible are wanting in the simplest elements of honesty and truthfulness. He read the Jewish law. A particularly vile crime is prohibited under severe penalties. He at once assumes and asserts that the Jews were in the habit of com