Perhaps no writer has ever roused more hatred in Christendom than Voltaire.  He was looked on as a sort of anti-Christ.  That was natural; his attacks were so tremendously effective at the time.  But he has been sometimes decried on the ground that he only demolished and made no effort to build up where he had pulled down.  This is a narrow complaint.  It might be replied that when a sewer is spreading plague in a town, we cannot wait to remove it till we have a new system of drains, and it may fairly be said that religion as practised in contemporary France was a poisonous sewer.  But the true answer is that knowledge, and therefore civilization, are advanced by criticism and negation, as well as by construction and positive discovery.  When a man has the talent to attack with effect falsehood, prejudice, and imposture, it is his duty, if there are any social duties, to use it.

For constructive thinking we must go to the other great leader of French thought,

[157] Rousseau, who contributed to the growth of freedom in a different way.  He was a deist, but his deism, unlike that of Voltaire, was religious and emotional.  He regarded Christianity with a sort of reverent scepticism.  But his thought was revolutionary and repugnant to orthodoxy; it made against authority in every sphere; and it had an enormous influence.  The clergy perhaps dreaded his theories more than the scoffs and negations of Voltaire.  For some years he was a fugitive on the face of the earth.  Emile, his brilliant contribution to the theory of education, appeared in 1762.  It contains some remarkable pages on religion, “the profession of faith of a Savoyard vicar,” in which the author’s deistic faith is strongly affirmed and revelation and theology rejected.  The book was publicly burned in Paris and an order issued for Rousseau’s arrest.  Forced by his friends to flee, he was debarred from returning to Geneva, for the government of that canton followed the example of Paris.  He sought refuge in the canton of Bern and was ordered to quit.  He then fled to the principality of Neufchatel which belonged to Prussia.  Frederick the Great, the one really tolerant ruler of the age, gave him protection, but he was persecuted and calumniated by the local clergy, who but for Frederick would

[158] have expelled him, and he went to England for a few months (1766), then returning to France, where he was left unmolested till his death.  The religious views of Rousseau are only a minor point in his heretical speculations.  It was by his daring social and political theories that he set the world on fire.  His Social Contract in which these theories were set forth was burned at Geneva.  Though his principles will not stand criticism for a moment, and though his doctrine worked mischief by its extraordinary power of turning men into fanatics, yet it contributed to progress, by helping to discredit privilege and to establish the view that the object of a State is to secure the wellbeing of all its members.