[110] time it was reversed at Toulouse.  When Voltaire visited Paris in 1778 he was acclaimed by crowds as the “defender of Calas and the Sirvens.”  His disinterested practical activity against persecution was of far more value than the treatise on Toleration which he wrote in connexion with the Calas episode.  It is a poor work compared with those of Locke and Bayle.  The tolerance which he advocates is of a limited kind; he would confine public offices and dignities to those who belong to the State religion.

But if Voltaire’s system of toleration is limited, it is wide compared with the religious establishment advocated by his contemporary, Rousseau.  Though of Swiss birth, Rousseau belongs to the literature and history of France; but it was not for nothing that he was brought up in the traditions of Calvinistic Geneva.  His ideal State would, in its way, have been little better than any theocracy.  He proposed to establish a “civil religion” which was to be a sort of undogmatic Christianity.  But certain dogmas, which he considered essential, were to be imposed on all citizens on pain of banishment.  Such were the existence of a deity, the future bliss of the good and punishment of the bad, the duty of tolerance towards all those who accepted the fundamental

[111] articles of faith.  It may be said that a State founded on this basis would be fairly inclusive—­that all Christian sects and many deists could find a place in it.  But by imposing indispensable beliefs, it denies the principle of toleration.  The importance of Rousseau’s idea lies in the fact that it inspired one of the experiments in religious policy which were made during the French Revolution.

The Revolution established religious liberty in France.  Most of the leaders were unorthodox.  Their rationalism was naturally of the eighteenth-century type, and in the preamble to the Declaration of Rights (1789) deism was asserted by the words “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being” (against which only one voice protested).  The Declaration laid down that no one was to be vexed on account of his religious opinions provided he did not thereby trouble public order.  Catholicism was retained as the “dominant” religion; Protestants (but not Jews) were admitted to public office.  Mirabeau, the greatest statesman of the day, protested strongly against the use of words like “tolerance” and “dominant.”  He said:  “The most unlimited liberty of religion is in my eyes a right so sacred that to express it by the word ‘toleration’ seems to me itself a sort of tyranny,

[112] since the authority which tolerates might also not tolerate.”  The same protest was made in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man which appeared two years later:  “Toleration is not the opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it.  Both are despotisms.  The one assumes itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it.”  Paine was an ardent deist, and he added:  “Were a bill brought into any parliament, entitled ’An Act to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to receive the worship of a Jew or a Turk,’ or ’to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it,’ all men would startle and call it blasphemy.  There would be an uproar.  The presumption of toleration in religious matters would then present itself unmasked.”