only the free and cheerful ways tolerated by the new philosophy but again the natural tendencies it sanctions, and the promises of terrestrial felicity with which it everywhere dazzles the eyes.  Thus the heart and the head both agree in their opposition. —­ Voltaire, with texts in hand, pursues it from one end to the other of its history, from the first biblical narration to the latest papal bulls, with unflagging animosity and energy, as critic, as historian, as geographer, as logician, as moralist, questioning its sources, opposing evidences, driving ridicule like a pick-ax into every weak spot where an outraged instinct beats against its mystic walls, and into all doubtful places where ulterior patchwork disfigures the primitive structure. —­ He respects, however, the first foundation, and, in this particular, the greatest writers of the day follow the same course.  Under positive religions that are false there is a natural religion that is true.  This is the simple and authentic text of which the others are altered and amplified translations.  Remove the ulterior and divergent excesses and the original remains; this common essence, on which all copies harmonize, is deism. —­ The same operation is to be made on civil and political law.  In France, where so many survive their utility, where privileges are no longer paid for with service, where rights are changed into abuses, how incoherent is the architecture of the old Gothic building!  How poorly adapted to a modern nation !  Of what use, in an unique and compact state, are those feudal compartments separating orders, corporations and provinces?  What a living paradox is the archbishop of a semi-province, a chapter owning 12,000 serfs, a drawing room abbé well supported by a monastery he never saw, a lord liberally pensioned to figure in antechambers, a magistrate purchasing the right to administer justice, a colonel leaving college to take the command of his inherited regiment, a Parisian trader who, renting a house for one year in Franche-Comté, alienates through this act alone the ownership of his property and of his person.  Throughout Europe there are others of the same character.  The best that can be said of “a civilized nation” [12] is that its laws, customs and practices are composed “one-half of abuses and one-half of tolerable usage”. —­ But, underneath these concrete laws, which contradict each other, and of which each contradicts itself, a natural law exists, implied in the codes, applied socially, and written in all hearts.

“Show me a country where it is honest to steal the fruits of my labor, to violate engagements, to lie for injurious purposes, to calumniate, to assassinate, to poison, to be ungrateful to one’s benefactor, to strike one’s father and mother on offering you food”. — “Justice and injustice is the same throughout the universe,”