men), thoughtless men! they do not see the inevitable consequences of their own proceeding.  The people hear and understand.  The intellectual barriers between the different classes of society are gradually becoming lower:  this is one of the clearest of the ways of Providence in our time.  Do you believe that the people will long consent to hear it said that they only live on errors, but that those errors are necessary for them?  Do you not see that they are about to rise, and answer, in the sentiment of their own dignity, that they will no longer be deceived, and that they intend to deliver themselves also from superstition?  Then, all restraining barriers removed, passions will have free course; and believe me, the rising floods will not respect those quiet haunts of study in which they will have had one of their springs.  The proof of this has been seen before.  Some men of the last century wished to destroy religion amongst decent folk, but not for the rabble:  they are Voltaire’s words, who had too much good sense to be an atheist, but whose pale deism is sometimes scarcely distinguishable from the negation of God.  “Your Majesty,” thus he wrote to his friend the King of Prussia, in January, 1757, “will render an eternal service to the human race, by destroying that infamous superstition, I do not say amongst the rabble, which is not worthy to be enlightened, and to which all yokes are suitable, but amongst honest people.”  A religion was necessary for the people; but Voltaire and the King of Prussia, the German barons, the French marquises, and the ladies who received their homage, could do without it.

Voltaire died before eating of the fruit of his works; and Alfred de Musset could only address to him his vengeful apostrophe at his tomb: 

     Sleep’st thou content, and does thy hideous smile
     Still flit, Voltaire, above thy fleshless bones?[37]

Voltaire was dead; but many of his friends and disciples were able to meditate, in the prisons of the Terror and as they mounted the steps of the scaffold, on the nature of the terrible game which they had played—­and lost.

So it fares with men of letters who have no God, but who would have a religion for the people.  Other men there are who would have a religion for the people, being themselves the while without restraint, because they are without religious convictions.  They abandon themselves to the ardent pursuit of riches, excitements, worldly pleasures.  These are they who have made a fortune by disgraceful means, perhaps the public sale of their consciences, and who by their luxurious extravagance overwhelm the honest and economical working-man.  These are the courtesans who parade in broad daylight the splendid rewards of their own infamy.  Let not such deceive themselves!  The people see these things; they form their judgment of them, and if they give way to the bad instincts which are in us all, where God is not in the heart to restrain them, to their hatred is added contempt.  If they are forcibly kept back from realizing their cherished hopes, they adjourn them, but without renouncing them.