From the day when he resolved upon this war against Christianity he sought for allies also opposed to it.  His intimacy with the king of Prussia, Frederic II., had this sole inducement.  He desired the support of thrones against the priesthood.  Frederic, who partook of his philosophy, and pushed it still further, even to atheism and the contempt of mankind, was the Dionysius of this modern Plato.  Louis XV., whose interest it was to keep up a good understanding with Prussia, dared not to show his anger against a man whom the king considered as his friend.  Voltaire, thus protected by a sceptre, redoubled his audacity.  He put thrones on one side, whilst he affected to make their interests mutual with his own, by pretending to emancipate them from the domination of Rome.  He handed over to kings the civil liberty of the people, provided that they would aid him in acquiring the liberty of consciences.  He even affected—­perhaps he felt—­respect for the absolute power of kings.  He pushed that respect so far as even to worship their weaknesses.  He palliated the infamous vices of the great Frederic, and brought philosophy on its knees before the mistresses of Louis XV.  Like the courtezan of Thebes, who built one of the pyramids of Egypt from the fruits of her debaucheries, Voltaire did not blush at any prostitution of genius, provided that the wages of his servility enabled him to purchase enemies against Christ.  He enrolled them by millions throughout Europe, and especially in France.  Kings were reminded of the middle ages, and of the thrones outraged by the popes.  They did not see, without umbrage and secret hate, the clergy as powerful as themselves with the people, and who under the name of cardinals, almoners, bishops or confessors, spied, or dictated its creeds even to courts themselves.  The parliaments, that civil clergy, a body redoubtable to sovereigns themselves, detested the mass of the clergy, although they protected its faith and its decrees.  The nobility, warlike, corrupted, and ignorant, leaned entirely to the unbelief which freed it from all morality.  Finally, the bourgeoisie, well-informed or learned, prefaced the emancipation of the third estate by the insurrection of the new condition of ideas.

Such were the elements of the revolution in religious matters.  Voltaire laid hold of them, at the precise moment, with that coup d’oeil of strong instinct which sees clearer than genius itself.  To an age young, fickle, and unreflecting, he did not present reason under the form of an austere philosophy, but beneath the guise of a facile freedom of ideas and a scoffing irony.  He would not have succeeded in making his age think, he did succeed in making it smile.  He never attacked it in front, nor with his face uncovered, in order that he might not set the laws in array against him; and to avoid the fate of Servetius, he, the modern AEsop, attacked under imaginary names the tyranny which he wished to destroy.  He concealed his hate in history, the drama, light poetry, romance, and even in jests.  His genius was a perpetual allusion, comprehending all his age, but impossible to be seized on by his enemies.  He struck, but his hand was concealed.  Yet the struggle of a man against a priesthood, an individual against an institution, a life against eighteen centuries, was by no means destitute of courage.