End Of The Abstract By Voltaire.

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE.

By translating into both the English and German languages Le Bon Sens, containing the Last Will and Testament of the French curate Jean Meslier, Miss Anna Knoop has performed a most useful and meritorious task, and in issuing a new edition of this work, it is but justice to her memory [Miss Knoop died Jan. 11, 1889.] to state that her translation has received the endorsement of our most competent critics.

In a letter dated Newburyport, Mass., Sep. 23, 1878, Mr. James Parton, the celebrated author, commends Miss Knoop for “translating Meslier’s book so well,” and says that: 

“This work of the honest pastor is the most curious and the most
powerful thing of the kind which the last century produced. . . . . 
Paine and Voltaire had reserves, but Jean Meslier had none.  He keeps
nothing back; and yet, after all, the wonder is not that there should
have been one priest who left that testimony at his death, but that all
priests do not.  True, there is a great deal more to be said about
religion, which I believe to be an eternal necessity of human nature,
but no man has uttered the negative side of the matter with so much
candor and completeness as Jean Meslier.”

The value of the testimony of a catholic priest, who in his last moments recanted the errors of his faith and asked God’s pardon for having taught the catholic religion, was fully appreciated by Voltaire, who highly commended this grand work of Meslier.  He voluntarily made every effort to increase its circulation, and even complained to D’ Alembert “that there were not as many copies in all Paris as he himself had dispersed throughout the mountains of Switzerland.” [See Letter 504, Voltaire to D’Alembert] He earnestly entreats his associates to print and distribute in Paris an edition of at least four or five thousand copies, and at the suggestion of D’Alembert, made an abstract or abridgment of The Testament “so small as to cost no more than five pence, and thus to be fitted for the pocket and reading of every workman.” [Letter 146, from D’Alembert.]

The Abbe Barruel claims in his Memoirs [See History of Jacobinism by the Abbe Barruel, 4 vols. 8 Vo, translated by the Hon. Robert Clifford, F. R. S., and printed in London in 1798.  The learned Abbe defines Jacobinism as “the error of every man who, judging of all things by the standard of his own reason, rejects in religious matters every authority that is not derived from the light of nature.  It is the error of every man who denies the possibility of any mystery beyond the limits of his reason, of every one who, discarding revelation in defence of the pretended rights of Reason, Equality, and Liberty, seeks to subvert the whole fabric of the Christian religion.”  B. 4.] to detect in the writings of Voltaire and of the leading Encyclopedists, a conspiracy