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A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 06

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Title: A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 06

Author: Voltaire

Commentator: Oliver Herbrand Gordon Leigh
        John Morley
        T. Smollett

Translator: William F. Fleming


        
Release date: March 28, 2011 [eBook #35626]
                Most recently updated: April 3, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY, VOLUME 06 ***

A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY

VOLUME VI

By

VOLTAIRE




EDITION DE LA PACIFICATION

THE WORKS OF VOLTAIRE

A CONTEMPORARY VERSION


  With Notes by Tobias Smollett, Revised and Modernized
     New Translations by William F. Fleming, and an
           Introduction by Oliver H.G. Leigh


A CRITIQUE AND BIOGRAPHY

BY

THE RT. HON. JOHN MORLEY

FORTY-THREE VOLUMES


  One hundred and sixty-eight designs, comprising reproductions
      of rare old engravings, steel plates, photogravures,
                    and curious fac-similes


VOLUME X


E.R. DuMONT

PARIS : LONDON : NEW YORK : CHICAGO

1901




_The WORKS of VOLTAIRE_

     _"Between two servants of Humanity, who appeared eighteen hundred
     years apart, there is a mysterious relation. * * * * Let us say it
     with a sentiment of profound respect: JESUS WEPT: VOLTAIRE SMILED.
     Of that divine tear and of that human smile is composed the
     sweetness of the present civilization."_

                                                    _VICTOR HUGO._




LIST OF PLATES--VOL. VI.

     VOLTAIRE'S HOME IN GENEVA _Frontispiece_
     THE ACROPOLIS AT ATHENS
     THE DUKE OF SULLY
     THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INQUISITION IN PORTUGAL


       *       *       *       *       *


VOLTAIRE

A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY

IN TEN VOLUMES

VOL. VI

HAPPY--JOB


       *       *       *       *       *


HAPPY--HAPPILY.


What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas
of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man,
in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.
Pleasure is more transient than happiness, and happiness than felicity.
When a person says--I am happy at this moment, he abuses the word, and
only means I am pleased. When pleasure is continuous, he may then call
himself happy. When this happiness lasts a little longer, it is a state
of felicity. We are sometimes very far from being happy in prosperity,
just as a surfeited invalid eats nothing of a great feast prepared for
him.

The ancient adage, "No person should be called happy before his death,"
seems to turn on very false principles, if we mean by this maxim that we
should not give the name of happy to a man who had been so constantly
from his birth to his last hour. This continuity of agreeable moments is
rendered impossible by the constitution of our organs, by that of the
elements on which we depend, and by that of mankind, on whom we depend
still more. Constant happiness is the philosopher's stone of the soul;
it is a great deal for us not to be a long time unhappy. A person whom
we might suppose to have always enjoyed a happy life, who perishes
miserably, would certainly merit the appellation of happy until his
death, and we might boldly pronounce that he had been the happiest of
men. Socrates might have been the happiest of the Greeks, although
superstitious, absurd, or iniquitous judges, or all together,
juridically poisoned him at the age of seventy years, on the suspicion
that he believed in only one God.

The philosophical maxim so much agitated, "_Nemo ante obitum felix_,"
therefore, appears absolutely false in every sense; and if it signifies
that a happy man may die an unhappy death, it signifies nothing of
consequence.

The proverb of being "Happy as a king" is still more false. Everybody
knows how the vulgar deceive themselves.

It is asked, if one condition is happier than another; if man in general
is happier than woman. It would be necessary to have tried all
conditions, to have been man and woman like Tiresias and Iphis, to
decide this question; still more would it be necessary to have lived in
all conditions, with a mind equally proper to each; and we must have
passed through all the possible states of man and woman to judge of it.

It is further queried, if of two men one is happier than the other. It
is very clear that he who has the gout and stone, who loses his fortune,
his honor, his wife and children, and who is condemned to be hanged
immediately after having been mangled, is less happy in this world in
everything than a young, vigorous sultan, or La Fontaine's cobbler.

But we wish to know which is the happier of two men equally healthy,
equally rich, and of an equal condition. It is clear that it is their
temper which decides it. The most moderate, the least anxious, and at
the same time the most sensible, is the most happy; but unfortunately
the most sensible is often the least moderate. It is not our condition,
it is the temper of our souls which renders us happy. This disposition
of our souls depends on our organs, and our organs have been arranged
without our having the least part in the arrangement.

It belongs to the reader to make his reflections on the above. There are
many articles on which he can say more than we ought to tell him. In
matters of art, it is necessary to instruct him; in affairs of morals,
he should be left to think for himself.

There are dogs whom we caress, comb, and feed with biscuits, and whom we
give to pretty females: there are others which are covered with the
mange, which die of hunger; others which we chase and beat, and which a
young surgeon slowly dissects, after having driven four great nails into
their paws. Has it depended upon these poor dogs to be happy or unhappy?

We say a happy thought, a happy feature, a happy repartee, a happy
physiognomy, happy climate, etc. These thoughts, these happy traits,
which strike like sudden inspirations, and which are called the happy
sallies of a man of wit, strike like flashes of light across our eyes,
without our seeking it. They are no more in our power than a happy
physiognomy; that is to say, a sweet and noble aspect, so independent of
us, and so often deceitful. The happy climate is that which nature
favors: so are happy imaginations, so is happy genius, or great talent.
And who can give himself genius? or who, when he has received some ray
of this flame, can preserve it always brilliant?

When we speak of a happy rascal, by this word we only comprehend his
success. "Felix Sulla"--the fortunate Sulla, and Alexander VI., a duke
of Borgia, have happily pillaged, betrayed, poisoned, ravaged, and
assassinated. But being villains, it is very likely that they were very
unhappy, even when not in fear of persons resembling themselves.

It may happen to an ill-disposed person, badly educated--a Turk, for
example, of whom it ought to be said, that he is permitted to doubt the
Christian faith--to put a silken cord round the necks of his viziers,
when they are rich; to strangle, massacre, or throw his brothers into
the Black Sea, and to ravage a hundred leagues of country for his glory.
It may happen, I say, that this man has no more remorse than his mufti,
and is very happy--on all which the reader may duly ponder.

There were formerly happy planets, and others unhappy, or unfortunate;
unhappily, they no longer exist. Some people would have deprived the
public of this useful Dictionary--happily, they have not succeeded.

Ungenerous minds, and absurd fanatics, every day endeavor to prejudice
the powerful and the ignorant against philosophers. If they were
unhappily listened to, we should fall back into the barbarity from which
philosophers alone have withdrawn us.




HEAVEN (CIEL MATÉRIEL).


The laws of optics, which are founded upon the nature of things, have
ordained that, from this small globe of earth on which we live, we shall
always see the material heaven as if we were the centre of it, although
we are far from being that centre; that we shall always see it as a
vaulted roof, hanging over a plane, although there is no other vaulted
roof than that of our atmosphere, which has no such plane; that our sun
and moon will always appear one-third larger at the horizon than at
their zenith, although they are nearer the spectator at the zenith than
at the horizon.

Such are the laws of optics, such is the structure of your eyes, that,
in the first place, the material heaven, the clouds, the moon, the sun,
which is at so vast a distance from you; the planets, which in their
apogee are still at a greater distance from it; all the stars placed at
distances yet vastly greater, comets and meteors, everything, must
appear to us in that vaulted roof as consisting of our atmosphere.

The sun appears to us, when in its zenith, smaller than when at fifteen
degrees below; at thirty degrees below the zenith it will appear still
larger than at fifteen; and finally, at the horizon, its size will seem
larger yet; so that its dimensions in the lower heaven decrease in
consequence of its elevations, in the following proportions:

     At the horizon                    100
     At fifteen degrees above           68
     At thirty degrees                  50
     At forty-five degrees              40

Its apparent magnitudes in the vaulted roof are as its apparent
elevations; and it is the same with the moon, and with a comet.

It is not habit, it is not the intervention of tracts of land, it is not
the refraction of the atmosphere which produces this effect. Malebranche
and Régis have disputed with each other on this subject; but Robert
Smith has calculated.

Observe the two stars, which, being at a prodigious distance from each
other, and at very different depths, in the immensity of space, are here
considered as placed in the circle which the sun appears to traverse.
You perceive them distant from each other in the great circle, but
approximating to each other in every circle smaller, or within that
described by the path of the sun.

It is in this manner that you see the material heaven. It is by these
invariable laws of optics that you perceive the planets sometimes
retrograde and sometimes stationary; there is in fact nothing of the
kind. Were you stationed in the sun, we should perceive all the planets
and comets moving regularly round it in those elliptical orbits which
God assigns. But we are upon the planet of the earth, in a corner of the
universe, where it is impossible for us to enjoy the sight of
everything.

Let us not then blame the errors of our senses, like Malebranche; the
steady laws of nature originating in the immutable will of the Almighty,
and adapted to the structure of our organs, cannot be errors.

We can see only the appearances of things, and not things themselves. We
are no more deceived when the sun, the work of the divinity--that star a
million times larger than our earth--appears to us quite flat and two
feet in width, than when, in a convex mirror, which is the work of our
own hands, we see a man only a few inches high.

If the Chaldæan magi were the first who employed the understanding which
God bestowed upon them, to measure and arrange in their respective
stations the heavenly bodies, other nations more gross and unintelligent
made no advance towards imitating them.

These childish and savage populations imagined the earth to be flat,
supported, I know not how, by its own weight in the air; the sun, moon,
and stars to move continually upon a solid vaulted roof called a
firmament; and this roof to sustain waters, and have flood-gates at
regular distances, through which these waters issued to moisten and
fertilize the earth.

But how did the sun, the moon, and all the stars reappear after their
setting? Of this they know nothing at all. The heaven touched the flat
earth: and there were no means by which the sun, moon, and stars could
turn under the earth, and go to rise in the east after having set in the
west. It is true that these children of ignorance were right by chance
in not entertaining the idea that the sun and fixed stars moved, round
the earth. But they were far from conceiving that the sun was immovable,
and the earth with its satellite revolving round him in space together
with the other planets. Their fables were more distant from the true
system of the world than darkness from light.

They thought that the sun and stars returned by certain unknown roads
after having refreshed themselves for their course at some spot, not
precisely ascertained, in the Mediterranean Sea. This was the amount of
astronomy, even in the time of Homer, who is comparatively recent; for
the Chaldæans kept their science to themselves, in order to obtain
thereby, greater respect from other nations. Homer says, more than once,
that the sun plunges into the ocean--and this ocean, be it observed, is
nothing but the Nile--here, by the freshness of the waters, he repairs
during the night the fatigue and exhaustion of the day, after which, he
goes to the place of his regular rising by ways unknown to mortals. This
idea is very like that of Baron Fœneste, who says, that the cause of
our not seeing the sun when he goes back, is that he goes back by night.

As, at that time, the nations of Syria and the Greeks were somewhat
acquainted with Asia and a small part of Europe, and had no notion of
the countries which lie to the north of the Euxine Sea and to the south
of the Nile, they laid it down as a certainty that the earth was a full
third longer than it was wide; consequently the heaven, which touched
the earth and embraced it, was also longer than it was wide. Hence came
down to us degrees of longitude and latitude, names which we have always
retained, although with far more correct ideas than those which
originally suggested them.

The Book of Job, composed by an ancient Arab who possessed some
knowledge of astronomy, since he speaks of the constellations, contains
nevertheless the following passage: "Where wert thou, when I laid the
foundation of the earth? Who hath taken the dimensions thereof? On what
are its foundations fixed? Who hath laid the cornerstone thereof?"

The least informed schoolboy, at the present day, would tell him, in
answer: "The earth has neither cornerstone nor foundation; and, as to
its dimensions, we know them perfectly well, as from Magellan to
Bougainville, various navigators have sailed round it."

The same schoolboy would put to silence the pompous declaimer
Lactantius, and all those who before and since his time have decided
that the earth was fixed upon the water, and that there can be no heaven
under the earth; and that, consequently, it is both ridiculous and
impious to suppose the existence of antipodes.

It is curious to observe with what disdain, with what contemptuous pity,
Lactantius looks down upon all the philosophers, who, from about four
hundred years before his time, had begun to be acquainted with the
apparent revolutions of the sun and planets, with the roundness of the
earth, and the liquid and yielding nature of the heaven through which
the planets revolved in their orbits, etc. He inquires, "by what degrees
philosophers attained such excess of folly as to conceive the earth to
be a globe, and to surround that globe with heaven." These reasonings
are upon a par with those he has adduced on the subject of the sibyls.

Our young scholar would address some such language as this to all these
consequential doctors: "You are to learn that there are no such things
as solid heavens placed one over another, as you have been told; that
there are no real circles in which the stars move on a pretended
firmament; that the sun is the centre of our planetary world; and that
the earth and the planets move round it in space, in orbits not circular
but elliptical. You must learn that there is, in fact, neither above nor
below, but that the planets and the comets tend all towards the sun,
their common centre, and that the sun tends towards them, according to
an eternal law of gravitation."

Lactantius and his gabbling associates would be perfectly astonished,
were the true system of the world thus unfolded to them.




HEAVEN OF THE ANCIENTS.


Were a silkworm to denominate the small quantity of downy substance
surrounding its ball, heaven, it would reason just as correctly as all
the ancients, when they applied that term to the atmosphere; which, as
M. de Fontenelle has well observed in his "Plurality of Worlds," is the
down of our ball.

The vapors which rise from our seas and land, and which form the clouds,
meteors, and thunder, were supposed, in the early ages of the world, to
be the residence of gods. Homer always makes the gods descend in clouds
of gold; and hence painters still represent them seated on a cloud. How
can any one be seated on water? It was perfectly correct to place the
master of the gods more at ease than the rest; he had an eagle to carry
him, because the eagle soars higher than the other birds.

The ancient Greeks, observing that the lords of cities resided in
citadels on the tops of mountains, supposed that the gods might also
have their citadel, and placed it in Thessaly, on Mount Olympus, whose
summit is sometimes hidden in clouds; so that their palace was on the
same floor with their heaven.

Afterwards, the stars and planets, which appear fixed to the blue vault
of our atmosphere, became the abodes of gods; seven of them had each a
planet, and the rest found a lodging where they could. The general
council of gods was held in a spacious hall which lay beyond the Milky
Way; for it was but reasonable that the gods should have a hall in the
air, as men had town-halls and courts of assembly upon earth.

When the Titans, a species of animal between gods and men, declared
their just and necessary war against these same gods in order to recover
a part of their patrimony, by the father's side, as they were the sons
of heaven and earth; they contented themselves with piling two or three
mountains upon one another, thinking that would be quite enough to make
them masters of heaven, and of the castle of Olympus.

     _Neve foret terris securior arduus æther,_
     _Affectasse ferunt regnum celeste gigantes;_
     _Attaque congestos struxisse ad sidera montes._
                          --OVID'S _Metamorph_., i. 151-153.

     Nor heaven itself was more secure than earth;
     Against the gods the Titans levied wars,
     And piled up mountains till they reached the stars.

It is, however, more than six hundred leagues from these stars to Mount
Olympus, and from some stars infinitely farther.

Virgil (Eclogue v, 57) does not hesitate to say: "_Sub pedibusque videt
nubes et sidera Daphnis._"

     Daphnis, the guest of heaven, with wondering eyes,
     Views in the Milky Way, the Starry skies,
     And far beneath him, from the shining sphere
     Beholds the morning clouds, and rolling year.
                                               --DRYDEN.

But where then could Daphnis possibly place himself?

At the opera, and in more serious productions, the gods are introduced
descending in the midst of tempests, clouds, and thunder; that is, God
is brought forward in the midst of the vapors of our petty globe. These
notions are so suitable to our weak minds, that they appear to us grand
and sublime.

This philosophy of children and old women was of prodigious antiquity;
it is believed, however, that the Chaldæans entertained nearly as
correct ideas as ourselves on the subject of what is called heaven. They
placed the sun in the midst of our planetary system, nearly at the same
distance from our globe as our calculation computes it; and they
supposed the earth and some planets to revolve round that star; this we
learn from Aristarchus of Samos. It is nearly the system of the world
since established by Copernicus: but the philosophers kept the secret to
themselves, in order to obtain greater respect both from kings and
people, or rather perhaps, to avoid the danger of persecution.

The language of error is so familiar to mankind that we still apply the
name of heaven to our vapors, and the space between the earth and moon.
We use the expression of ascending to heaven, just as we say the sun
turns round, although we well know that it does not. We are, probably,
the heaven of the inhabitants of the moon; and every planet places its
heaven in that planet nearest to itself.

Had Homer been asked, to what heaven the soul of Sarpedon had fled, or
where that of Hercules resided, Homer would have been a good deal
embarrassed, and would have answered by some harmonious verses.

What assurance could there be, that the ethereal soul of Hercules would
be more at its ease in the planet Venus or in Saturn, than upon our own
globe? Could its mansion be in the sun? In that flaming and consuming
furnace, it would appear difficult for it to endure its station. In
short, what was it that the ancients meant by heaven? They knew nothing
about it; they were always exclaiming, "Heaven and earth," thus placing
completely different things in most absurd connection. It would be just
as judicious to exclaim, and connect in the same manner, infinity and an
atom. Properly speaking, there is no heaven. There are a prodigious
number of globes revolving in the immensity of space, and our globe
revolves like the rest.

The ancients thought that to go to heaven was to ascend; but there is no
ascent from one globe to another. The heavenly bodies are sometimes
above our horizon, and sometimes below it. Thus, let us suppose that
Venus, after visiting Paphos, should return to her own planet, when that
planet had set; the goddess would not in that case ascend, in reference
to our horizon; she would descend, and the proper expression would be
then, descended to heaven. But the ancients did not discriminate with
such nicety; on every subject of natural philosophy, their notions were
vague, uncertain and contradictory. Volumes have been composed in order
to ascertain and point out what they thought upon many questions of this
description. Six words would have been sufficient--"they did not think
at all." We must always except a small number of sages; but they
appeared at too late a period, and but rarely disclosed their thoughts;
and when they did so, the charlatans in power took care to send them to
heaven by the shortest way.

A writer, if I am not mistaken, of the name of Pluche, has been recently
exhibiting Moses as a great natural philosopher; another had previously
harmonized Moses with Descartes, and published a book, which he called,
"_Carlesius Mosaisans_"; according to him, Moses was the real inventor
of "Vortices," and the subtile matter; but we full well know, that when
God made Moses a great legislator and prophet, it was no part of His
scheme to make him also a professor of physics. Moses instructed the
Jews in their duty, and did not teach them a single word of philosophy.
Calmet, who compiled a great deal, but never reasoned at all, talks of
the system of the Hebrews; but that stupid people never had any system.
They had not even a school of geometry; the very name was utterly
unknown to them. The whole of their science was comprised in
money-changing and usury.

We find in their books ideas on the structure of heaven, confused,
incoherent, and in every respect worthy of a people immersed in
barbarism. Their first heaven was the air, the second the firmament in
which the stars were fixed. This firmament was solid and made of glass,
and supported the superior waters which issued from the vast reservoirs
by flood-gates, sluices, and cataracts, at the time of the deluge.

Above the firmament or these superior waters was the third heaven, or
the empyream, to which St. Paul was caught up. The firmament was a sort
of demi-vault which came close down to the earth.

It is clear that, according to this opinion, there could be no
antipodes. Accordingly, St. Augustine treats the idea of antipodes as an
absurdity; and Lactantius, whom we have already quoted, expressly says
"can there possibly be any persons so simple as to believe that there
are men whose heads are lower than their feet?" etc.

St. Chrysostom exclaims, in his fourteenth homily, "Where are they who
pretend that the heavens are movable, and that their form is circular?"

Lactantius, once more, says, in the third book of his "Institutions," "I
could prove to you by many arguments that it is impossible heaven should
surround the earth."

The author of the "Spectacle of Nature" may repeat to M. le Chevalier as
often as he pleases, that Lactantius and St. Chrysostom are great
philosophers. He will be told in reply that they were great saints; and
that to be a great saint, it is not at all necessary to be a great
astronomer. It will be believed that they are in heaven, although it
will be admitted to be impossible to say precisely in what part of it.




HELL.


Infernum, subterranean; the regions below, or the infernal regions.
Nations which buried the dead placed them in the inferior or infernal
regions. Their soul, then, was with them in those regions. Such were the
first physics and the first metaphysics of the Egyptians and Greeks.

The Indians, who were far more ancient, who had invented the ingenious
doctrine of the metempsychosis, never believed that souls existed in the
infernal regions.

The Japanese, Coreans, Chinese, and the inhabitants of the vast
territory of eastern and western Tartary never knew a word of the
philosophy of the infernal regions.

The Greeks, in the course of time, constituted an immense kingdom of
these infernal regions, which they liberally conferred on Pluto and his
wife Proserpine. They assigned them three privy counsellors, three
housekeepers called Furies, and three Fates to spin, wind, and cut the
thread of human life. And, as in ancient times, every hero had his dog
to guard his gate, so was Pluto attended and guarded by an immense dog
with three heads; for everything, it seems, was to be done by threes. Of
the three privy counsellors, Minos, Æacus, and Rhadamanthus, one judged
Greece, another Asia Minor--for the Greeks were then unacquainted with
the Greater Asia--and the third was for Europe.

The poets, having invented these infernal regions, or hell, were the
first to laugh at them. Sometimes Virgil mentions hell in the "Æneid" in
a style of seriousness, because that style was then suitable to his
subject. Sometimes he speaks of it with contempt in his "Georgics" (ii.
490, etc.).

     _Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_
     _Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum_
     _Subjecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari!_

     Happy the man whose vigorous soul can pierce
     Through the formation of this universe,
     Who nobly dares despise, with soul sedate,
     The den of Acheron, and vulgar fears and fate.
                                             --WHARTON.

The following lines from the "Troad" (chorus of act ii.), in which
Pluto, Cerberus, Phlegethon, Styx, etc., are treated like dreams and
childish tales, were repeated in the theatre of Rome, and applauded by
forty thousand hands:

     _.... Tœnara et aspero_
     _Regnum sub domino, limen et obsidens_
     _Custos non facili Cerberus ostio_
     _Rumores vacui, verbaque inania,_
     _Et par solicito fabula somnio._

Lucretius and Horace express themselves equally strongly. Cicero and
Seneca used similar language in innumerable parts of their writings. The
great emperor Marcus Aurelius reasons still more philosophically than
those I have mentioned. "He who fears death, fears either to be deprived
of all senses, or to experience other sensations. But, if you no longer
retain your own senses, you will be no longer subject to any pain or
grief. If you have senses of a different nature, you will be a totally
different being."

To this reasoning, profane philosophy had nothing to reply. Yet,
agreeably to that contradiction or perverseness which distinguishes the
human species, and seems to constitute the very foundation of our
nature, at the very time when Cicero publicly declared that "not even an
old woman was to be found who believed in such absurdities," Lucretius
admitted that these ideas were powerfully impressive upon men's minds;
his object, he says, is to destroy them:

     _.... Si certum finem esse viderent_
     _Ærumnarum homines, aliqua ratione valerent_
     _Religionibus atque minis obsistere vatum._
     _Nunc ratio nulla est restandi, nulla facultas;_
     _Æternas quoniam poenas in morte timendum._
                                --LUCRETIUS, i. 108.

     .... If it once appear
     That after death there's neither hope nor fear;
     Then might men freely triumph, then disdain
     The poet's tales, and scorn their fancied pain;
     But now we must submit, since pains we fear
     Eternal after death, we know not where.
                                              --CREECH.

It was therefore true, that among the lowest classes of the people, some
laughed at hell, and others trembled at it. Some regarded Cerberus, the
Furies, and Pluto as ridiculous fables, others perpetually presented
offerings to the infernal gods. It was with them just as it is now among
ourselves:

     _Et quocumque tamen miseri venere, parentant,_
     _Et nigros mactant pecudes, et Manibus divis_
     _Inferias mittunt multoque in rebus acerbis_
     _Acrius admittunt animos ad religionem._
                                --LUCRETIUS, iii. 51.

     Nay, more than that, where'er the wretches come
     They sacrifice black sheep on every tomb,
     To please the manes; and of all the rout,
     When cares and dangers press, grow most devout.
                                              --CREECH.

Many philosophers who had no belief in the fables about hell, were yet
desirous that the people should retain that belief. Such was Zimens of
Locris. Such was the political historian Polybius. "Hell," says he, "is
useless to sages, but necessary to the blind and brutal populace."

It is well known that the law of the Pentateuch never announces a hell.
All mankind was involved in this chaos of contradiction and uncertainty,
when Jesus Christ came into the world. He confirmed the ancient doctrine
of hell, not the doctrine of the heathen poets, not that of the Egyptian
priests, but that which Christianity adopted, and to which everything
must yield. He announced a kingdom that was about to come, and a hell
that should have no end.

He said, in express words, at Capernaum in Galilee, "Whosoever shall
call his brother '_Raca_,' shall be condemned by the sanhedrim; but
whosoever shall call him 'fool,' shall be condemned to _Gehenna Hinnom_,
Gehenna of fire."

This proves two things, first, that Jesus Christ was adverse to abuse
and reviling; for it belonged only to Him, as master, to call the
Pharisees hypocrites, and a "generation of vipers."

Secondly, that those who revile their neighbor deserve hell; for the
Gehenna of fire was in the valley of Hinnom, where victims had formerly
been burned in sacrifice to Moloch, and this Gehenna was typical of the
fire of hell.

He says, in another place, "If any one shall offend one of the weak who
believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about
his neck and he were cast into the sea.

"And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter
into life maimed, than to go into the Gehenna of inextinguishable fire,
where the worm dies not, and where the fire is not quenched.

"And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter
lame into eternal life, than to be cast with two feet into the
inextinguishable Gehenna, where the worm dies not; and where the fire is
not quenched.

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; it is better to enter into
the kingdom of God with one eye, than to be cast with both eyes into the
Gehenna of fire, where the worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched.

"For everyone shall be burned with fire, and every victim shall be
salted with salt.

"Salt is good; but if the salt have lost its savor, with what will you
salt?

"You have salt in yourselves, preserve peace one with another."

He said on another occasion, on His journey to Jerusalem, "When the
master of the house shall have entered and shut the door, you will
remain without, and knock, saying, 'Lord, open unto us;' and he will
answer and say unto you, '_Nescio vos_,' I know you not; whence are you?
And then ye shall begin to say, we have eaten and drunk with thee, and
thou hast taught in our public places; and he will reply, '_Nescio
vos_,' whence are you, workers of iniquity? And there shall be weeping
and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see there Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and the prophets, and yourselves cast out."

Notwithstanding the other positive declarations made by the Saviour of
mankind, which assert the eternal damnation of all who do not belong to
our church, Origen and some others were not believers in the eternity of
punishments.

The Socinians reject such punishments; but they are without the pale.
The Lutherans and Calvinists, although they have strayed beyond the
pale, yet admit the doctrine of a hell without end.

When men came to live in society, they must have perceived that a great
number of criminals eluded the severity of the laws; the laws punished
public crimes; it was necessary to establish a check upon secret crimes;
this check was to be found only in religion. The Persians, Chaldæans,
Egyptians, and Greeks, entertained the idea of punishments after the
present life, and of all the nations of antiquity that we are acquainted
with, the Jews, as we have already remarked, were the only one who
admitted solely temporal punishments. It is ridiculous to believe, or
pretend to believe, from some excessively obscure passages, that hell
was recognized by the ancient laws of the Jews, by their Leviticus, or
by their Decalogue, when the author of those laws says not a single word
which can bear the slightest relation to the chastisements of a future
life. We might have some right to address the compiler of the Pentateuch
in such language as the following: "You are a man of no consistency, as
destitute of probity as understanding, and totally unworthy of the name
which you arrogate to yourself of legislator. What! you are perfectly
acquainted, it seems, with that doctrine so eminently repressive of
human vice, so necessary to the virtue and happiness of mankind--the
doctrine of hell; and yet you do not explicitly announce it; and, while
it is admitted by all the nations which surround you, you are content to
leave it for some commentators, after four thousand years have passed
away, to suspect that this doctrine might possibly have been entertained
by you, and to twist and torture your expressions, in order to find that
in them which you have never said. Either you are grossly ignorant not
to know that this belief was universal in Egypt, Chaldæa, and Persia; or
you have committed the most disgraceful error in judgment, in not having
made it the foundation-stone of your religion."

The authors of the Jewish laws could at most only answer: "We confess
that we are excessively ignorant; that we did not learn the art of
writing until a late period; that our people were a wild and barbarous
horde, that wandered, as our own records admit, for nearly half a
century in impracticable deserts, and at length obtained possession of a
petty territory by the most odious rapine and detestable cruelty ever
mentioned in the records of history. We had no commerce with civilized
nations, and how could you suppose that, so grossly mean and grovelling
as we are in all our ideas and usages, we should have invented a system
so refined and spiritual as that in question?"

We employed the word which most nearly corresponds with soul, merely to
signify life; we know our God and His ministers, His angels, only as
corporeal beings; the distinction of soul and body, the idea of a life
beyond death, can be the fruit only of long meditation and refined
philosophy. Ask the Hottentots and negroes, who inhabit a country a
hundred times larger than ours, whether they know anything of a life to
come? We thought we had done enough in persuading the people under our
influence that God punished offenders to the fourth generation, either
by leprosy, by sudden death, or by the loss of the little property of
which the criminal might be possessed.

To this apology it might be replied: "You have invented a system, the
ridicule and absurdity of which are as clear as the sun at noon-day; for
the offender who enjoyed good health, and whose family were in
prosperous circumstances, must absolutely have laughed you to scorn."

The apologist for the Jewish law would here rejoin: "You are much
mistaken; since for one criminal who reasoned correctly, there were a
hundred who never reasoned at all. The man who, after he had committed a
crime, found no punishment of it attached to himself or his son, would
yet tremble for his grandson. Besides, if after the time of committing
his offence he was not speedily seized with some festering sore, such as
our nation was extremely subject to, he would experience it in the
course of years. Calamities are always occurring in a family, and we,
without difficulty, instilled the belief that these calamities were
inflicted by the hand of God taking vengeance for secret offences."

It would be easy to reply to this answer by saying: "Your apology is
worth nothing; for it happens every day that very worthy and excellent
persons lose their health and their property; and, if there were no
family that did not experience calamity, and that calamity at the same
time was a chastisement from God, all the families of your community
must have been made up of scoundrels."

The Jewish priest might again answer and say that there are some
calamities inseparable from human nature, and others expressly inflicted
by the hand of God. But, in return, we should point out to such a
reasoner the absurdity of considering fever and hail-stones in some
cases as divine punishments; in others as mere natural effects.

In short, the Pharisees and the Essenians among the Jews did admit,
according to certain notions of their own, the belief of a hell. This
dogma had passed from the Greeks to the Romans, and was adopted by the
Christians.

Many of the fathers of the church rejected the doctrine of eternal
punishments. It appeared to them absurd to burn to all eternity an
unfortunate man for stealing a goat. Virgil has finely said:

     _.... Sedit eternumque sedebit_
     _Infelix Theseus._

     Unhappy Theseus, doomed forever there,
     Is fixed by fate on his eternal chair.
                                     --DRYDEN.

But it is vain for him to maintain or imply that Theseus is forever
fixed to his chair, and that this position constitutes his punishment.
Others have imagined Theseus to be a hero who could never be seen on any
seat in hell, and who was to be found in the Elysian Fields.

A Calvinistical divine, of the name of Petit Pierre, not long since
preached and published the doctrine that the damned would at some future
period be pardoned. The rest of the ministers of his association told
him that they wished for no such thing. The dispute grew warm. It was
said that the king, whose subjects they were, wrote to him, that since
they were desirous of being damned without redemption, he could have no
reasonable objection, and freely gave his consent. The damned majority
of the church of Neufchâtel ejected poor Petit Pierre, who had thus
converted hell into a mere purgatory. It is stated that one of them said
to him: "My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than
yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your
servant, your tailor, and your lawyer to believe in it."

I will add, as an illustration of this passage, a short address of
exhortation to those philosophers who in their writings deny a hell; I
will say to them: "Gentlemen, we do not pass our days with Cicero,
Atticus, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, the Chancellor de l'Hôpital, La
Mothe le Vayer, Desyveteaux, René Descartes, Newton, or Locke, nor with
the respectable Bayle, who was superior to the power and frown of
fortune, nor with the too scrupulously virtuous infidel Spinoza, who,
although laboring under poverty and destitution, gave back to the
children of the grand pensionary De Witt an allowance of three hundred
florins, which had been granted him by that great statesman, whose
heart, it may be remembered, the Hollanders actually devoured, although
there was nothing to be gained by it. Every man with whom we intermingle
in life is not a des Barreaux, who paid the pleaders their fees for a
cause which he had forgotten to bring into court. Every woman is not a
Ninon de L'Enclos, who guarded deposits in trust with religious
fidelity, while the gravest personages in the state were violating them.
In a word, gentlemen, all the world are not philosophers.

"We are obliged to hold intercourse and transact business, and mix up in
life with knaves possessing little or no reflection--with vast numbers
of persons addicted to brutality, intoxication, and rapine. You may, if
you please, preach to them that there is no hell, and that the soul of
man is mortal. As for myself, I will be sure to thunder in their ears
that if they rob me they will inevitably be damned. I will imitate the
country clergyman, who, having had a great number of sheep stolen from
him, at length said to his hearers, in the course of one of his sermons:
'I cannot conceive what Jesus Christ was thinking about when he died for
such a set of scoundrels as you are.'"

There is an excellent book for fools called "The Christian Pedagogue,"
composed by the reverend father d'Outreman, of the Society of Jesus, and
enlarged by Coulon, curé of Ville-Juif-les-Paris. This book has passed,
thank God, through fifty-one editions, although not a single page in it
exhibits a gleam of common sense.

Friar Outreman asserts--in the hundred and fifty-seventh page of the
second edition in quarto--that one of Queen Elizabeth's ministers,
Baron Hunsdon, predicted to Cecil, secretary of state, and to six other
members of the cabinet council, that they as well as he would be damned;
which, he says, was actually the case, and is the case with all
heretics. It is most likely that Cecil and the other members of the
council gave no credit to the said Baron Hunsdon; but if the fictitious
baron had said the same to six common citizens, they would probably have
believed him.

Were the time ever to arrive in which no citizen of London believed in a
hell, what course of conduct would be adopted? What restraint upon
wickedness would exist? There would exist the feeling of honor, the
restraint of the laws, that of the Deity Himself, whose will it is that
mankind shall be just, whether there be a hell or not.




HELL (DESCENT INTO).


Our colleague who wrote the article on "Hell" has made no mention of the
descent of Jesus Christ into hell. This is an article of faith of high
importance; it is expressly particularized in the creed of which we have
already spoken. It is asked whence this article of faith is derived; for
it is not to be found in either of our four gospels, and the creed
called the Apostles' Creed is not older than the age of those learned
priests, Jerome, Augustine, and Rufinus.

It is thought that this descent of our Lord into hell is taken
originally from the gospel of Nicodemus, one of the oldest.

In that gospel the prince of Tartarus and Satan, after a long
conversation with Adam, Enoch, Elias the Tishbite, and David, hears a
voice like the thunder, and a voice like a tempest. David says to the
prince of Tartarus, "Now, thou foul and miscreant prince of hell, open
thy gates and let the King of Glory enter," etc. While he was thus
addressing the prince, the Lord of Majesty appeared suddenly in the form
of man, and He lighted up the eternal darkness, and broke asunder the
indissoluble bars, and by an invincible virtue He visited those who lay
in the depth of the darkness of guilt, in the shadow of the depth of
sin.

Jesus Christ appeared with St. Michael; He overcame death; He took Adam
by the hand; and the good thief followed Him, bearing the cross. All
this took place in hell, in the presence of Carinus and Lenthius, who
were resuscitated for the express purpose of giving evidence of the fact
to the priests Ananias and Caiaphas, and to Doctor Gamaliel, at that
time St. Paul's master.

This gospel of Nicodemus has long been considered as of no authority.
But a confirmation of this descent into hell is found in the First
Epistle of St. Peter, at the close of the third chapter: "Because Christ
died once for our sins, the just for the unjust, that He might offer us
to God; dead indeed in the flesh, but resuscitated in spirit, by which
He went to preach to the spirits that were in prison."

Many of the fathers interpreted this passage very differently, but all
were agreed as to the fact of the descent of Jesus into hell after His
death. A frivolous difficulty was started upon the subject. He had,
while upon the cross, said to the good thief: "This day shalt thou be
with Me in paradise." By going to hell, therefore, He failed to perform
His promise. This objection is easily answered by saying that He took
him first to hell and afterwards to paradise; but, then, what becomes of
the stay of three days?

Eusebius of Cæsarea says that Jesus left His body, without waiting for
Death to come and seize it; and that, on the contrary, He seized Death,
who, in terror and agony, embraced His feet, and afterwards attempted to
escape by flight, but was prevented by Jesus, who broke down the gates
of the dungeons which enclosed the souls of the saints, drew them forth
from their confinement, resuscitated them, then resuscitated Himself,
and conducted them in triumph to that heavenly Jerusalem _which
descended from heaven every night_, and was actually seen by the
astonished eyes of St. Justin.

It was a question much disputed whether all those who were resuscitated
died again before they ascended into heaven. St. Thomas, in his
"Summary," asserts that they died again. This also is the opinion of the
discriminating and judicious Calmet. "We maintain," says he, in his
dissertation on this great question, "that the saints who were
resuscitated, after the death of the Saviour died again, in order to
revive hereafter."

God had permitted, ages before, that the profane Gentiles should imitate
in anticipation these sacred truths. The ancients imagined that the gods
resuscitated Pelops; that Orpheus extricated Eurydice from hell, at
least for a moment; that Hercules delivered Alcestis from it; that
Æsculapius resuscitated Hippolytus, etc. Let us ever discriminate
between fable and truth, and keep our minds in the same subjection with
respect to whatever surprises and astonishes us, as with respect to
whatever appears perfectly conformable to their circumscribed and narrow
views.




HERESY.


SECTION I.

A Greek word, signifying "belief, or elected opinion." It is not greatly
to the honor of human reason that men should be hated, persecuted,
massacred, or burned at the stake, on account of their chosen opinions;
but what is exceedingly little to our honor is that this mischievous and
destructive madness has been as peculiar to us as leprosy was to the
Hebrews, or lues formerly to the Caribs.

We well know, theologically speaking, that heresy having become a crime,
as even the word itself is a reproach; we well know, I say, that the
Latin church, which alone can possess reason, has also possessed the
right of reproving all who were of a different opinion from her own.

On the other side, the Greek church had the same right; accordingly, it
reproved the Romans when they chose a different opinion from the Greeks
on the procession of the Holy Spirit, the viands which might be taken in
Lent, the authority of the pope, etc.

But upon what ground did any arrive finally at the conclusion that, when
they were the strongest, they might burn those who entertained chosen
opinions of their own? Those who had such opinions were undoubtedly
criminal in the sight of God, since they were obstinate. They will,
therefore, as no one can possibly doubt, be burned to all eternity in
another world; but why burn them by a slow fire in this? The sufferers
have represented that such conduct is a usurpation of the jurisdiction
of God; that this punishment is very hard and severe, considered as an
infliction by men; and that it is, moreover, of no utility, since one
hour of suffering added to eternity is an absolute cipher.

The pious inflicters, however, replied to these reproaches that nothing
was more just than to put upon burning coals whoever had a self-formed
opinion; that to burn those whom God Himself would burn, was in fact a
holy conformity to God; and finally, that since, by admission, the
burning for an hour or two was a mere cipher in comparison with
eternity, the burning of five or six provinces for chosen opinions--for
heresies--was a matter in reality of very little consequence.

In the present day it is asked, "Among what cannibals have these
questions been agitated, and their solutions proved by facts?" We must
admit with sorrow and humiliation that it was asked even among
ourselves, and in the very same cities where nothing is minded but
operas, comedies, balls, fashions, and intrigue.

Unfortunately, it was a tyrant who introduced the practice of destroying
heretics--not one of those equivocal tyrants who are regarded as saints
by one party, and monsters by another, but one Maximus, competitor of
Theodosius I., a decided tyrant, in the strictest meaning of the term,
over the whole empire.

He destroyed at Trier, by the hands of the executioner, the Spaniard
Priscillian and his adherents, whose opinions were pronounced erroneous
by some bishops of Spain. These prelates solicited the capital
punishment of the Priscillianists with a charity so ardent that Maximus
could refuse them nothing. It was by no means owing to them that St.
Martin was not beheaded as a heretic. He was fortunate enough to quit
Trier and escape back to Tours.

A single example is sufficient to establish a usage. The first Scythian
who scooped out the brains of his enemy and made a drinking-cup of his
skull, was allowed all the rank and consequence in Scythia. Thus was
consecrated the practice of employing the executioner to cut off
"opinions."

No such thing as heresy existed among the religions of antiquity,
because they had reference only to moral conduct and public worship.
When metaphysics became connected with Christianity, controversy
prevailed; and from controversy arose different parties, as in the
schools of philosophy. It was impossible that metaphysics should not
mingle the uncertainties essential to their nature with the faith due to
Jesus Christ. He had Himself written nothing; and His incarnation was a
problem which the new Christians, whom He had not Himself inspired,
solved in many different ways. "Each," as St. Paul expressly observes,
"had his peculiar party; some were for Apollos, others for Cephas."

Christians in general, for a long time, assumed the name of Nazarenes,
and even the Gentiles gave them no other appellations during the two
first centuries. But there soon arose a particular school of Nazarenes,
who believed a gospel different from the four canonical ones. It has
even been pretended that this gospel differed only very slightly from
that of St. Matthew, and was in fact anterior to it. St. Epiphanius and
St. Jerome place the Nazarenes in the cradle of Christianity.

Those who considered themselves as knowing more than the rest, took the
denomination of gnostics, "knowers"; and this denomination was for a
long time so honorable that St. Clement of Alexandria, in his
"_Stromata_" always calls the good Christians true gnostics. "Happy are
they who have entered into the gnostic holiness! He who deserves the
name of gnostic resists seducers and gives to every one that asks." The
fifth and sixth books of the "_Stromata_" turn entirely upon the
perfection of gnosticism.

The Ebionites existed incontestably in the time of the apostles. That
name, which signifies "poor," was intended to express how dear to them
was the poverty in which Jesus was born.

Cerinthus was equally ancient. The "Apocalypse" of St. John was
attributed to him. It is even thought that St. Paul and he had violent
disputes with each other.

It seems to our weak understandings very natural to expect from the
first disciples a solemn declaration, a complete and unalterable
profession of faith, which might terminate all past, and preclude any
future quarrels; but God permitted it not so to be. The creed called the
"Apostles' Creed," which is short, and in which are not to be found the
consubstantiality, the word trinity, or the seven sacraments, did not
make its appearance before the time of St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and
the celebrated priest Rufinus. It was by this priest, the enemy of St.
Jerome, that we are told it was compiled. Heresies had had time to
multiply, and more than fifty were enumerated as existing in the fifth
century.

Without daring to scrutinize the ways of Providence, which are
impenetrable by the human mind, and merely consulting, as far as we are
permitted, our feeble reason, it would seem that of so many opinions on
so many articles, there would always exist one which must prevail, which
was the orthodox, "the right of teaching." The other societies, besides
the really orthodox, soon assumed that title also; but being the weaker
parties, they had given to them the designation of "heretics."

When, in the progress of time, the Christian church in the East, which
was the mother of that in the West, had irreparably broken with her
daughter, each remained sovereign in her distinct sphere, and each had
her particular heresies, arising out of the dominant opinion.

The barbarians of the North, having but recently become Christians,
could not entertain the same opinions as Southern countries, because
they could not adopt the same usages. They could not, for example, for a
long time adore images, as they had neither painters nor sculptors. It
also was somewhat dangerous to baptize an infant in winter, in the
Danube, the Weser, or the Elbe.

It was no easy matter for the inhabitants of the shores of the Baltic to
know precisely the opinions held in the Milanese and the march of
Ancona. The people of the South and of the North of Europe had therefore
chosen opinions different from each other. This seems to me to be the
reason why Claude, bishop of Turin, preserved in the ninth century all
the usages and dogmas received in the seventh and eighth, from the
country of the Allobroges, as far as the Elbe and the Danube.

These dogmas and usages became fixed and permanent among the inhabitants
of valleys and mountainous recesses, and near the banks of the Rhône,
among a sequestered and almost unknown people, whom the general
desolation left untouched in their seclusion and poverty, until they at
length became known, under the name of the Vaudois in the twelfth, and
that of the Albigenses in the thirteenth century. It is known how their
chosen opinions were treated; what crusades were preached against them;
what carnage was made among them; and that, from that period to the
present day, Europe has not enjoyed a single year of tranquillity and
toleration.

It is a great evil to be a heretic; but is it a great good to maintain
orthodoxy by soldiers and executioners? Would it not be better that
every man should eat his bread in peace under the shade of his own
fig-tree? I suggest so bold a proposition with fear and trembling.


SECTION II.

_Of the Extirpation of Heresies._

It appears to me that, in relation to heresies, we ought to distinguish
between opinion and faction. From the earliest times of Christianity
opinions were divided, as we have already seen. The Christians of
Alexandria did not think, on many points, like those of Antioch. The
Achaians were opposed to the Asiatics. This difference has existed
through all past periods of our religion, and probably will always
continue. Jesus Christ, who might have united all believers in the same
sentiment, has not, in fact, done so; we must, therefore, presume that
He did not desire it, and that it was His design to exercise in all
churches the spirit of indulgence and charity, by permitting the
existence of different systems of faith, while all should be united in
acknowledging Him for their chief and master. All the varying sects, a
long while tolerated by the emperors, or concealed from their
observation, had no power to persecute and proscribe one another, as
they were all equally subject to the Roman magistrates. They possessed
only the power of disputing with each other. When the magistrates
prosecuted them, they all claimed the rights of nature. They said:
"Permit us to worship God in peace; do not deprive us of the liberty you
allow to the Jews."

All the different sects existing at present may hold the same language
to those who oppress them. They may say to the nations who have granted
privileges to the Jews: Treat us as you treat these sons of Jacob; let
us, like them, worship God according to the dictates of conscience. Our
opinion is not more injurious to your state or realm than Judaism. You
tolerate the enemies of Jesus Christ; tolerate us, therefore, who adore
Jesus Christ, and differ from yourselves only upon subtle points of
theology; do not deprive yourselves of the services of useful subjects.
It is of consequence to you to obtain their labor and skill in your
manufactures, your marine, and your agriculture, and it is of no
consequence at all to you that they hold a few articles of faith
different from your own. What you want is their work, and not their
catechism.

Faction is a thing perfectly different. It always happens, as a matter
of necessity, that a persecuted sect degenerates into a faction. The
oppressed unite, and console and encourage one another. They have more
industry to strengthen their party than the dominant sect has for their
extermination. To crush them or be crushed by them is the inevitable
alternative. Such was the case after the persecution raised in 303 by
the Cæsar, Galerius, during the last two years of the reign of
Diocletian. The Christians, after having been favored by Diocletian for
the long period of eighteen years, had become too numerous and wealthy
to be extirpated. They joined the party of Constantius Chlorus; they
fought for Constantine his son; and a complete revolution took place in
the empire.

We may compare small things to great, when both are under the direction
of the same principle or spirit. A similar revolution happened in
Holland, in Scotland, and in Switzerland. When Ferdinand and Isabella
expelled from Spain the Jews,--who were settled there not merely before
the reigning dynasty, but before the Moors and Goths, and even the
Carthaginians--the Jews would have effected a revolution in that country
if they had been as warlike as they were opulent, and if they could have
come to an understanding with the Arabs.

In a word, no sect has ever changed the government of a country but when
it was furnished with arms by despair. Mahomet himself would not have
succeeded had he not been expelled from Mecca and a price set upon his
head.

If you are desirous, therefore, to prevent the overflow of a state by
any sect, show it toleration. Imitate the wise conduct exhibited at the
present day by Germany, England, Holland, Denmark, and Russia. There is
no other policy to be adopted with respect to a new sect than to
destroy, without remorse, both leaders and followers, men, women, and
children, without a single exception, or to tolerate them when they are
numerous. The first method is that of a monster, the second that of a
sage.

Bind to the state all the subjects of that state by their interest; let
the Quaker and the Turk find their advantage in living under your laws.
Religion is between God and man; civil law is between you and your
people.


SECTION III.

It is impossible not to regret the loss of a "History of Heresies,"
which Strategius wrote by order of Constantine. Ammianus Marcellinus
informs us that the emperor, wishing to ascertain the opinions of the
different sects, and not finding any other person who could give correct
ideas on the subject, imposed the office of drawing up a report or
narrative upon it on that officer, who acquitted himself so well, that
Constantine was desirous of his being honored in consequence with the
name of Musonianus. M. de Valois, in his notes upon Ammianus, observes
that Strategius, who was appointed prefect of the East, possessed as
much knowledge and eloquence, as moderation and mildness; such, at
least, is the eulogium passed upon him by Libanius.

The choice of a layman by the emperor shows that an ecclesiastic at that
time had not the qualities indispensable for a task so delicate. In
fact, St. Augustine remarks that a bishop of Bresse, called Philastrius,
whose work is to be found in the collection of the fathers, having
collected all the heresies, even including those which existed among the
Jews before the coming of Jesus Christ, reckons twenty-eight of the
latter and one hundred and twenty-eight from the coming of Christ; while
St. Epiphanius, comprising both together, makes the whole number but
eighty. The reason assigned by St. Augustine for this difference is,
that what appears heresy to the one, does not appear so to the other.
Accordingly this father tells the Manichæans: "We take the greatest care
not to treat you with rigor; such conduct we leave to those who know not
what pains are necessary for the discovery of truth, and how difficult
it is to avoid falling into errors; we leave it to those who know not
with what sighs and groans even a very slight knowledge of the divine
nature is alone to be acquired. For my own part, I consider it my duty
to bear with you as I was borne with formerly myself, and to show you
the same tolerance which I experienced when I was in error."

If, however, any one considers the infamous imputations, which we have
noticed under the article on "Genealogy," and the abominations of which
this professedly indulgent and candid father accused the Manichæans in
the celebration of their mysteries--as we shall see under the article on
"Zeal"--we shall be convinced that toleration was never the virtue of
the clergy. We have already seen, under the article on "Council," what
seditions were excited by the ecclesiastics in relation to Arianism.
Eusebius informs us that in some places the statues of Constantine were
thrown down because he wished the Arians to be tolerated; and Sozomen
says that on the death of Eusebius of Nicomedia, when Macedonius, an
Arian, contested the see of Constantinople with Paul, a Catholic, the
disturbance and confusion became so dreadful in the church, from which
each endeavored to expel the other, that the soldiers, thinking the
people in a state of insurrection, actually charged upon them; a fierce
and sanguinary conflict ensued, and more than three thousand persons
were slain or suffocated. Macedonius ascended the episcopal throne, took
speedy possession of all the churches, and persecuted with great cruelty
the Novatians and Catholics. It was in revenge against the latter of
these that he denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, just as he
recognized the divinity of the Word, which was denied by the Arians out
of mere defiance to their protector Constantius, who had deposed him.

The same historian adds that on the death of Athanasius, the Arians,
supported by Valens, apprehended, bound in chains, and put to death
those who remained attached to Peter, whom Athanasius had pointed out as
his successor. Alexandria resembled a city taken by assault. The Arians
soon possessed themselves of the churches, and the bishop, installed by
them, obtained the power of banishing from Egypt all who remained
attached to the Nicean creed.

We read in Socrates that, after the death of Sisinnius, the church of
Constantinople became again divided on the choice of a successor, and
Theodosius the Younger placed in the patriarchal see the violent and
fiery Nestorius. In his first sermon he addresses the following language
to the emperor: "Give me the land purged of heretics, and I will give
you the kingdom of Heaven; second me in the extermination of heretics,
and I engage to furnish you with effectual assistance against the
Persians." He afterwards expelled the Arians from the capital, armed the
people against them, pulled down their churches, and obtained from the
emperor rigorous and persecuting edicts to effect their extirpation. He
employed his powerful influence subsequently in procuring the arrest,
imprisonment, and even whipping of the principal persons among the
people who had interrupted him in the middle of a discourse, in which he
was delivering his distinguishing system of doctrine, which was soon
condemned at the Council of Ephesus.

Photius relates that when the priest reached the altar, it was customary
in the church of Constantinople for the people to chant: "Holy God,
powerful God, immortal God"; and the name given to this part of the
service was "the trisagion." The priest, Peter had added: "Who hast been
crucified for us, have mercy upon us." The Catholics considered this
addition as containing the error of the Eutychian Theopathists, who
maintained that the divinity had suffered; they, however, chanted the
trisagion with the addition, to avoid irritating the emperor Anastasius,
who had just deposed another Macedonius, and placed in his stead
Timotheus, by whose order this addition was ordered to be chanted. But
on a particular day the monks entered the church, and, instead of the
addition in question, chanted a verse from one of the Psalms: the people
instantly exclaimed: "The orthodox have arrived very seasonably!" All
the partisans of the Council of Chalcedon chanted, in union with the
monks, the verse from the Psalm; the Eutychians were offended; the
service was interrupted; a battle commenced in the church; the people
rushed out, obtained arms as speedily as possible, spread carnage and
conflagration through the city, and were pacified only by the
destruction of ten thousand lives.

The imperial power at length established through all Egypt the authority
of this Council of Chalcedon; but the massacre of more than a hundred
thousand Egyptians, on different occasions, for having refused to
acknowledge the council, had planted in the hearts of the whole
population an implacable hatred against the emperors. A part of those
who were hostile to the council withdrew to Upper Egypt, others quitted
altogether the dominions of the empire and passed over to Africa and
among the Arabs, where all religions were tolerated.

We have already observed that under the reign of the empress Irene the
worship of images was re-established and confirmed by the second Council
of Nice. Leo the Armenian, Michael the Stammerer, and Theophilus,
neglected nothing to effect its abolition; and this opposition caused
further disturbance in the empire of Constantinople, till the reign of
the empress Theodora, who gave the force of law to the second Council of
Nice, extinguished the party of Iconoclasts, or image-breakers, and
exerted the utmost extent of her authority against the Manichæans. She
despatched orders throughout the empire to seek for them everywhere, and
put all those to death who would not recant. More than a hundred
thousand perished by different modes of execution. Four thousand, who
escaped from this severe scrutiny and extensive punishment, took refuge
among the Saracens, united their own strength with theirs, ravaged the
territories of the empire, and erected fortresses in which the
Manichæans, who had remained concealed through terror of capital
punishment, found an asylum, and constituted a hostile force, formidable
from their numbers, and from their burning hatred both of the emperors
and Catholics. They frequently inflicted on the territories of the
empire dread and devastation, and cut to pieces its disciplined armies.

We abridge the details of these dreadful massacres; those of Ireland,
those of the valleys of Piedmont, those which we shall speak of in the
article on "Inquisition," and lastly, the massacre of St. Bartholomew,
displayed in the West the same spirit of intolerance, against which
nothing more pertinent and sensible has been written than what we find
in the works of Salvian.

The following is the language employed respecting the followers of one
of the principal heresies by this excellent priest of Marseilles, who
was surnamed the master of bishops, who deplored with bitterness the
violence and vices of his age, and who was called the Jeremiah of the
fifth century. "The Arians," says he, "are heretics; but they do not
know it; they are heretics among us, but they are not so among
themselves; for they consider themselves so perfectly and completely
Catholic, that they treat us as heretics. We are convinced that they
entertain an opinion injurious to the divine generation, inasmuch as
they say that the Son is less than the Father. They, on the other hand,
think that we hold an opinion injurious to the Father, because we regard
the Father and the Son equal. The truth is with us, but they consider it
as favoring them. We give to God the honor which is due to Him, but
they, according to their peculiar way of thinking, maintain that they do
the same. They do not acquit themselves of their duty; but in the very
point where they fail in doing so, they make the greatest duty of
religion consist. They are impious, but even in being so they consider
themselves as following, and as practising, genuine piety. They are then
mistaken, but from a principle of love to God; and, although they have
not the true faith, they regard that which they have actually embraced
as the perfect love of God.

"The sovereign judge of the universe alone knows how they will be
punished for their errors in the day of judgment. In the meantime he
patiently bears with them, because he sees that if they are in error,
they err from pure motives of piety."




HERMES.

_Hermes, or Ermes, Mercury Trismegistus, or Thaut, or Taut, or Thot._


We neglect reading the ancient book of Mercury Trismegistus, and we are
not wrong in so doing. To philosophers it has appeared a sublime piece
of jargon, and it is perhaps for this reason that they believed it the
work of a great Platonist.

Nevertheless, in this theological chaos, how many things there are to
astonish and subdue the human mind! God, whose triple essence is wisdom,
power and bounty; God, forming the world by His thought, His word; God
creating subaltern gods; God commanding these gods to direct the
celestial orbs, and to preside over the world; the sun; the Son of God;
man His image in thought; light, His principal work a divine
essence--all these grand and lively images dazzle a subdued imagination.

It remains to be known whether this work, as much celebrated as little
read, was the work of a Greek or of an Egyptian. St. Augustine hesitates
not in believing that it is the work of an Egyptian, who pretended to be
descended from the ancient Mercury, from the ancient Thaut, the first
legislator of Egypt. It is true that St. Augustine knew no more of the
Egyptian than of the Greek; but in his time it was necessary that we
should not doubt that Hermes, from whom we received theology, was an
Egyptian sage, probably anterior to the time of Alexander, and one of
the priests whom Plato consulted.

It has always appeared to me that the theology of Plato in nothing
resembled that of other Greeks, with the exception of Timæus, who had
travelled in Egypt, as well as Pythagoras.

The Hermes Trismegistus that we possess is written in barbarous Greek,
and in a foreign idiom. This is a proof that it is a translation in
which the words have been followed more than the sense.

Joseph Scaliger, who assisted the lord of Candale, bishop of Aire, to
translate the Hermes, or Mercury Trismegistus, doubts not that the
original was Egyptian. Add to these reasons that it is not very probable
that a Greek would have addressed himself so often to Thaut. It is not
natural for us to address ourselves to strangers with so much
warm-heartedness; at least, we see no example of it in antiquity.

The Egyptian Æsculapius, who is made to speak in this book, and who is
perhaps the author of it, wrote to Ammon, king of Egypt: "Take great
care how you suffer the Greeks to translate the books of our Mercury,
our Thaut, because they would disfigure them." Certainly a Greek would
not have spoken thus; there is therefore every appearance of this book
being Egyptian.

There is another reflection to be made, which is, that the systems of
Hermes and Plato were equally formed to extend themselves through all
the Jewish schools, from the time of the Ptolemies. This doctrine made
great progress in them; you see it completely displayed by the Jew
Philo, a learned man after the manner of those times.

He copies entire passages from Mercury Trismegistus in his chapter on
the formation of the world. "Firstly," says he, "God made the world
intelligible, the Heavens incorporeal, and the earth invisible; he
afterwards created the incorporeal essence of water and spirit; and
finally the essence of incorporeal light, the origin of the sun and of
the stars."

Such is the pure doctrine of Hermes. He adds that the word, or invisible
and intellectual thought, is the image of God. Here is the creation of
the world by the word, by thought, by the _logos_, very strongly
expressed.

Afterwards follows the doctrine of Numbers, which descended from the
Egyptians to the Jews. He calls reason the relation of God. The number
of seven is the accomplishment of all things, "which is the reason,"
says he, "that the lyre has only seven strings."

In a word Philo possessed all the philosophy of his time.

We are therefore deceived, when we believe that the Jews, under the
reign of Herod, were plunged in the same state of ignorance in which
they were previously immersed. It is evident that St. Paul was well
informed. It is only necessary to read the first chapter of St. John,
which is so different from those of the others, to perceive that the
author wrote precisely like Hermes and Plato. "In the beginning was the
word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. The same was in
the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was
not anything made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of man."
It is thus that St. Paul says: "God made the worlds by His Son."

In the time of the apostles were seen whole societies of Christians who
were only too learned, and thence substituted a fantastic philosophy for
simplicity of faith. The Simons, Menanders, and Cerinthuses, taught
precisely the doctrines of Hermes. Their Æons were only the subaltern
gods, created by the great Being. All the first Christians, therefore,
were not ignorant men, as it always has been asserted; since there were
several of them who abused their literature; even in the Acts the
governor Festus says to St. Paul: "Paul, thou art beside thyself; much
learning doth make thee mad."

Cerinthus dogmatized in the time of St. John the Evangelist. His errors
were of a profound, refined, and metaphysical cast. The faults which he
remarked in the construction of the world made him think--at least so
says Dr. Dupin--that it was not the sovereign God who created it, but a
virtue inferior to this first principle, which had not the knowledge of
the sovereign God. This was wishing to correct even the system of Plato,
and deceiving himself, both as a Christian and a philosopher; but at the
same time it displayed a refined and well-exercised mind.

It is the same with the primitives called Quakers, of whom we have so
much spoken. They have been taken for men who cannot see beyond their
noses, and who make no use of their reason. However, there have been
among them several who employed all the subtleties of logic. Enthusiasm
is not always the companion of total ignorance, it is often that of
erroneous information.




HISTORIOGRAPHER.


This is a title very different from that of historian. In France we
commonly see men of letters pensioned, and, as it was said formerly,
appointed to write history. Alain Chartier was the historiographer of
Charles VII.; he says that he interrogated the domestics of this prince,
and put them on their oaths, according to the duty of his charge, to
ascertain whether Charles really had Agnes Sorel for his mistress. He
concludes that nothing improper ever passed between these lovers; and
that all was reduced to a few honest caresses, to which these domestics
had been the innocent witnesses. However, it is proved, not by
historiographers, but by historians supported by family titles, that
Charles VII. had three daughters by Agnes Sorel, the eldest of whom,
married to one Breze, was stabbed by her husband. From this time there
were often titled historiographers in France, and it was the custom to
give them commissions of councillors of state, with the provisions of
their charge. They were commensal officers of the king's house. Matthieu
had these privileges under Henry IV., but did not therefore write a
better history.

At Venice it is always a noble of the senate who possesses this title
and function, and the celebrated Nani has filled them with general
approbation. It is very difficult for the historiographer of a prince
not to be a liar; that of a republic flatters less; but he does not tell
all the truth. In China historiographers are charged with collecting all
the events and original titles under a dynasty. They throw the leaves
numbered into a vast hall, through an orifice resembling the lion's
mouth at Venice, into which is cast all secret intelligence. When the
dynasty is extinct the hall is opened and the materials digested, of
which an authentic history is composed. The general journal of the
empire also serves to form the body of history; this journal is superior
to our newspapers, being made under the superintendence of the mandarins
of each province, revised by a supreme tribunal, and every piece bearing
an authenticity which is decisive in contentious matters.

Every sovereign chose his own historiographer. Vittorio Siri was one;
Pelisson was first chosen by Louis XIV. to write the events of his
reign, and acquitted himself of his task with eloquence in the history
of Franche-Comté. Racine, the most elegant of poets, and Boileau, the
most correct, were afterwards substituted for Pelisson. Some curious
persons have collected "Memoirs of the Passage of the Rhine," written by
Racine. We cannot judge by these memoirs whether Louis XIV. passed the
Rhine or not with his troops, who swam across the river. This example
sufficiently demonstrates how rarely it happens that an historiographer
dare tell the truth. Several also, who have possessed this title, have
taken good care of writing history; they have followed the example of
Amyot, who said that he was too much attached to his masters to write
their lives. Father Daniel had the patent of historiographer, after
having given his "History of France"; he had a pension of 600 livres,
regarded merely as a suitable stipend for a monk.

It is very difficult to assign true bounds to the arts, sciences, and
literary labor. Perhaps it is the proper duty of an historiographer to
collect materials, and that of an historian to put them in order. The
first can amass everything, the second arrange and select. The
historiographer is more of the simple annalist, while the historian
seems to have a more open field for reflection and eloquence.

We need scarcely say here that both should equally tell the truth, but
we can examine this great law of Cicero: "_Ne quid veri tacere non
audeat_."--"That we ought not to dare to conceal any truth." This rule
is of the number of those that want illustration. Suppose a prince
confides to his historiographer an important secret to which his honor
is attached, or that the good of the state requires should not be
revealed--should the historiographer or historian break his word with
the prince, or betray his country to obey Cicero? The curiosity of the
public seems to exact it; honor and duty forbid it. Perhaps in this case
he should renounce writing history.

If a truth dishonors a family, ought the historiographer or historian to
inform the public of it? No; doubtless he is not bound to reveal the
shame of individuals; history is no satire.

But if this scandalous truth belongs to public events, if it enters into
the interests of the state--if it has produced evils of which it imports
to know the cause, it is then that the maxims of Cicero should be
observed; for this law is like all others which must be executed,
tempered, or neglected, according to circumstances.

Let us beware of this humane respect when treating of acknowledged
public faults, prevarications, and injustices, into which the
misfortunes of the times have betrayed respectable bodies. They cannot
be too much exposed; they are beacons which warn these always-existing
bodies against splitting again on similar rocks. If an English
parliament has condemned a man of fortune to the torture--if an assembly
of theologians had demanded the blood of an unfortunate who differed in
opinion from themselves, it should be the duty of an historian to
inspire all ages with horror for these juridical assassins. We should
always make the Athenians blush for the death of Socrates.

Happily, even an entire people always find it good to have the crimes of
their ancestors placed before them; they like to condemn them, and to
believe themselves superior. The historiographer or historian encourages
them in these sentiments, and, in retracing the wars of government and
religion, prevents their repetition.




HISTORY.


SECTION I.

_Definition of History._

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the
contrary, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. There is the
history of human opinions, which is scarcely anything more than the
history of human errors.

The history of the arts may be made the most useful of all, when to a
knowledge of their invention and progress it adds a description of their
mechanical means and processes.

Natural history, improperly designated "history," is an essential part
of natural philosophy. The history of events has been divided into
sacred and profane. Sacred history is a series of divine and miraculous
operations, by which it has pleased God formerly to direct and govern
the Jewish nation, and, in the present day, to try our faith. "To learn
Hebrew, the sciences, and history," says La Fontaine, "is to drink up
the sea."

     _Si j'apprenois l'Hébreu, les sciences, l'histoire,_
     _Tout cela, c'est la mer à boire._
                      --LA FONTAINE, book viii, fable 25.


_The Foundations of History._

The foundations of all history are the recitals of events, made by
fathers to their children, and afterwards transmitted from one
generation to another. They are, at most, only probable in their origin
when they do not shock common sense, and they lose a degree of
probability at every successive transmission. With time the fabulous
increases and the true disappears; hence it arises that the original
traditions and records of all nations are absurd. Thus the Egyptians had
been governed for many ages by the gods. They had next been under the
government of demi-gods; and, finally, they had kings for eleven
thousand three hundred and forty years, and during that period the sun
had changed four times from east and west.

The Phœnicians, in the time of Alexander, pretended that they had
been settled in their own country for thirty thousand years; and those
thirty thousand years were as full of prodigies as the Egyptian
chronology. I admit it to be perfectly consistent with physical
possibility that Phœnicia may have existed, not merely for thirty
thousand years, but thirty thousand millions of ages, and that it may
have endured, as well as the other portions of the globe, thirty
millions of revolutions. But of all this we possess no knowledge.

The ridiculous miracles which abound in the ancient history of Greece
are universally known.

The Romans, although a serious and grave people, have, nevertheless,
equally involved in fables the early periods of their history. That
nation, so recent in comparison with those of Asia, was five hundred
years without historians. It is impossible, therefore, to be surprised
on finding that Romulus was the son of Mars; that a she-wolf was his
nurse; that he marched with a thousand men from his own village, Rome,
against twenty thousand warriors belonging to the city of the Sabines;
that he afterwards became a god; that the elder Tarquin cut through a
stone with a razor, and that a vestal drew a ship to land with her
girdle, etc.

The first annals of modern nations are no less fabulous; things
prodigious and improbable ought sometimes, undoubtedly, to be related,
but only as proofs of human credulity. They constitute part of the
history of human opinion and absurdities; but the field is too immense.

_Of Monuments or Memorials._

The only proper method of endeavoring to acquire some knowledge of
ancient history is to ascertain whether there remain any incontestable
public monuments. We possess only three such, in the way of writing or
inscription. The first is the collection of astronomical observations
made during nineteen hundred successive years at Babylon, and
transferred by Alexander to Greece. This series of observations, which
goes back two thousand two hundred and thirty-four years beyond our
vulgar era, decidedly proves that the Babylonians existed as an
associated and incorporated people many ages before; for the arts are
struck out and elaborated only in the slow course of time, and the
indolence natural to mankind permits thousands of years to roll away
without their acquiring any other knowledge or talents than what are
required for food, clothing, shelter, and mutual destruction. Let the
truth of these remarks be judged of from the state of the Germans and
the English in the time of Cæsar, from that of the Tartars at the
present day, from that of two-thirds of Africa, and from that of all the
various nations found in the vast continent of America, excepting, in
some respects, the kingdoms of Peru and Mexico, and the republic of
Tlascala. Let it be recollected that in the whole of the new world not a
single individual could write or read.

The second monument is the central eclipse of the sun, calculated in
China two thousand one hundred and fifty-five years before our vulgar
era, and admitted by all our astronomers to have actually occurred. We
must apply the same remark to the Chinese as to, the people of Babylon.
They had undoubtedly, long before this period, constituted a vast empire
and social polity. But what places the Chinese above all the other
nations of the world is that neither their laws, nor manners, nor the
language exclusively spoken by their men of learning, have experienced
any change in the course of about four thousand years. Yet this nation
and that of India, the most ancient of all that are now subsisting,
those which possess the largest and most fertile tracts of territory,
those which had invented nearly all the arts almost before we were in
possession even of any of them, have been always omitted, down to our
time, in our pretended universal histories. And whenever a Spaniard or a
Frenchman enumerated the various nations of the globe, neither of them
failed to represent his own country as the first monarchy on earth, and
his king as the greatest sovereign, under the flattering hope, no doubt,
that that greatest of sovereigns, after having read his book, would
confer upon him a pension.

The third monument, but very inferior to the two others, is the Arundel
Marbles. The chronicle of Athens was inscribed on these marbles two
hundred and sixty-three years before our era, but it goes no further
back than the time of Cecrops, thirteen hundred and nineteen years
beyond the time of its inscription. In the history of all antiquity
these are the only incontestable epochs that we possess.

Let us attend a little particularly to these marbles, which were brought
from Greece by Lord Arundel. The chronicle contained in them commences
fifteen hundred and seventy-seven years before our era. This, at the
present time, makes an antiquity of 3,348 years, and in the course of
that period you do not find a single miraculous or prodigious event on
record. It is the same with the Olympiads. It must not be in reference
to these that the expression can be applied of "_Græcia mendax_" (lying
Greece). The Greeks well knew how to distinguish history from fable, and
real facts from the tales of Herodotus; just as in relation to important
public affairs, their orators borrowed nothing from the discourses of
the sophists or the imagery of the poets.

The date of the taking of Troy is specified in these marbles, but there
is no mention made of Apollo's arrows, or the sacrifice of Iphigenia, or
the ridiculous battles of the gods. The date of the inventions of
Triptolemus and Ceres is given; but Ceres is not called goddess. Notice
is taken of a poem upon the rape of Proserpine; but it is not said that
she is the daughter of Jupiter and a goddess, and the wife of the god of
hell.

Hercules is initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, but not a single word
is mentioned of the twelve labors, nor of his passage to Africa in his
cup, nor of his divinity, nor of the great fish by which he was
swallowed, and which, according to Lycophron, kept him in its belly
three days and three nights.

Among us, on the contrary, a standard is brought by an angel from heaven
to the monks of St. Denis; a pigeon brings a bottle of oil to the church
of Rheims; two armies of serpents engage in pitched battle in Germany;
an archbishop of Mentz is besieged and devoured by rats; and to complete
and crown the whole, the year in which these adventures occurred, is
given with the most particular precision. The abbé Langlet, also
condescending to compile, compiles these contemptible fooleries, while
the almanacs, for the hundredth time, repeat them. In this manner are
our youth instructed and enlightened; and all these trumpery fables are
put in requisition even for the education of princes!

All history is comparatively recent. It is by no means astonishing to
find that we have, in fact, no profane history that goes back beyond
about four thousand years. The cause of this is to be found in the
revolutions of the globe, and the long and universal ignorance of the
art which transmits events by writing. There are still many nations
totally unacquainted with the practice of this art. It existed only in a
small number of civilized states, and even in them was confined to
comparatively few hands. Nothing was more rare among the French and
Germans than knowing how to write; down to the fourteenth century of our
era, scarcely any public acts were attested by witnesses. It was not
till the reign of Charles VII. in France, in 1454, that an attempt was
made to reduce to writing some of the customs of France. The art was
still more uncommon among the Spaniards, and hence it arises that their
history is so dry and doubtful till the time of Ferdinand and Isabella.
We perceive, from what has been said, with what facility the very small
number of persons who possessed the art of writing might impose by means
of it, and how easy it has been to produce a belief in the most enormous
absurdities.

There have been nations who have subjugated a considerable part of the
world, and who yet have not been acquainted with the use of characters.
We know that Genghis Khan conquered a part of Asia in the beginning of
the thirteenth century; but it is not from him, nor from the Tartars,
that we have derived that knowledge. Their history, written by the
Chinese, and translated by Father Gaubil, states that these Tartars were
at that time unacquainted with the art of writing.

This art was, unquestionably, not likely to be less unknown to the
Scythian Ogus-kan, called by the Persians and Greeks Madies, who
conquered a part of Europe and Asia long before the reign of Cyrus. It
is almost a certainty that at that time, out of a hundred nations, there
were only two or three that employed characters. It is undoubtedly
possible, that in an ancient world destroyed, mankind were acquainted
with the art of writing and the other arts, but in our world they are
all of recent date.

There remain monuments of another kind, which serve to prove merely the
remote antiquity of certain nations, an antiquity preceding all known
epochs, and all books; these are the prodigies of architecture, such as
the pyramids and palaces of Egypt, which have resisted and wearied the
power of time. Herodotus, who lived two thousand two hundred years ago,
and who had seen them, was unable to learn from the Egyptian priests at
what periods these structures were raised.

[Illustration: "A MONUMENT OF ANTIQUITY"--THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS]

It is difficult to ascribe to the oldest of the pyramids an antiquity of
less than four thousand years, and, it is necessary to consider, that
those ostentatious piles, erected by monarchs, could not have been
commenced till long after the establishment of cities. But, in order to
build cities in a country every year inundated, it must always be
recollected that it would have been previously necessary in this land of
slime and mud, to lay the foundation upon piles, that they might thus be
inaccessible to the inundation; it would have been necessary, even
before taking this indispensable measure of precaution, and before the
inhabitants could be in a state to engage in such important and even
dangerous labors, that the people should have contrived retreats, during
the swelling of the Nile, between the two chains of rocks which exist on
the right and left banks of the river. It would have been necessary that
these collected multitudes should have instruments of tillage, and of
architecture, a knowledge of architecture and surveying, regular laws,
and an active police. All these things require a space of time
absolutely prodigious. We see, every day, by the long details which
relate even to those of our undertakings, which are most necessary and
most diminutive, how difficult it is to execute works of magnitude, and
that they not only require unwearied perseverance, but many generations
animated by the same spirit.

However, whether we admit that one or two of those immense masses were
erected by Menés, or Thaut, or Cheops, or Rameses, we shall not, in
consequence, have the slightest further insight into the ancient history
of Egypt. The language of that people is lost; and all we know in
reference to the subject is that before the most ancient historians
existed, there existed materials for writing ancient history.


SECTION II.

As we already possess, I had almost said, twenty thousand works, the
greater number of them extending to many volumes, on the subject,
exclusively, of the history of France; and as, even a studious man, were
he to live a hundred years, would find it impossible to read them, I
think it a good thing to know where to stop. We are obliged to connect
with the knowledge of our own country the history of our neighbors. We
are still less permitted to remain ignorant of the Greeks and Romans,
and their laws which are become ours; but, if to this laborious study we
should resolve to add that of more remote antiquity, we should resemble
the man who deserted Tacitus and Livy to study seriously the "Thousand
and One Nights." All the origins of nations are evidently fables. The
reason is that men must have lived long in society, and have learned to
make bread and clothing (which would be matters of some difficulty)
before they acquired the art of transmitting all their thoughts to
posterity (a matter of greater difficulty still). The art of writing is
certainly not more than six thousand years old, even among the Chinese;
and, whatever may be the boast of the Chaldæans and Egyptians, it
appears not at all likely that they were able to read and write earlier.

The history, therefore, of preceding periods, could be transmitted by
memory alone; and we well know how the memory of past events changes
from one generation to another. The first histories were written only
from the imagination. Not only did every people invent its own origin,
but it invented also the origin of the whole world.

If we may believe Sanchoniathon, the origin of things was a thick air,
which was rarified by the wind; hence sprang desire and love, and from
the union of desire and love were formed animals. The stars were later
productions, and intended merely to adorn the heavens, and to rejoice
the sight of the animals upon earth.

The Knef of the Egyptians, their Oshiret and Ishet, which we call Osiris
and Isis, are neither less ingenious nor ridiculous. The Greeks
embellished all these fictions. Ovid collected them and ornamented them
with the charms of the most beautiful poetry. What he says of a god who
develops or disembroils chaos, and of the formation of man, is sublime.

     _Sanctius his animal, mentisque capacius altæ_
     _Deerat adhuc, et quod dominari in cætera posset._
     _Natus homo est...._
                                  --OVID, _Metam._, i, v. 76.

     A creature of a more exalted kind
     Was wanting yet, and then was man designed;
     Conscious or thought, of more capacious breast,
     For empire formed, and fit to rule the rest.
                                              --DRYDEN.

     _Pronaque cum spectent animalia cætera terram;_
     _Os homini sublime dedit cœlumque tueri_
     _Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus._
                                        METAM., i, v. 84.

     Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
     Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
     Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
     Beholds his own hereditary skies.
                                           --DRYDEN.

Hesiod, and other writers who lived so long before, would have been very
far from expressing themselves with this elegant sublimity. But, from
the interesting moment of man's formation down to the era of the
Olympiads, everything is plunged in profound obscurity.

Herodotus is present at the Olympic games, and, like an old woman to
children, recites his narratives, or rather tales, to the assembled
Greeks. He begins by saying that the Phœnicians sailed from the Red
Sea into the Mediterranean; which, if true, must necessarily imply that
they had doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and made the circuit of Africa.

Then comes the rape of Io; then the fable of Gyges and Candaules; then
the wondrous stories of banditti, and that of the daughter of Cheops,
king of Egypt, having required a hewn stone from each of her many
lovers, and obtained, in consequence, a number large enough to build one
of the pyramids.

To this, add the oracles, prodigies, and frauds of priests, and you have
the history of the human race.

The first periods of the Roman history appear to have been written by
Herodotus; our conquerors and legislators knew no other way of counting
their years as they passed away, than by driving nails into a wall by
the hand of the sacred pontiff.

The great Romulus, the king of a village, is the son of the god Mars,
and a recluse, who was proceeding to a well to draw water in a pitcher.
He has a god for his father, a woman of loose manners for his mother,
and a she-wolf for his nurse. A buckler falls from heaven expressly for
Numa. The invaluable books of the Sibyls are found by accident. An
augur, by divine permission, divides a large flint-stone with a razor. A
vestal, with her mere girdle, draws into the water a large vessel that
has been stranded. Castor and Pollux come down to fight for the Romans,
and the marks of their horses' feet are imprinted on the stones. The
transalpine Gauls advanced to pillage Rome; some relate that they were
driven away by geese, others that they carried away with them much gold
and silver; but it is probable that, at that time in Italy, geese were
far more abundant than silver. We have imitated the first Roman
historians, at least in their taste for fables. We have our oriflamme,
our great standard, brought from heaven by an angel, and the holy phial
by a pigeon; and, when to these we add the mantle of St. Martin, we feel
not a little formidable.

What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our
duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.

It is often asked whether the fable of the sacrifice of Iphigenia is
taken from the history of Jephthah; whether the deluge of Deucalion is
invented in imitation of that of Noah; whether the adventure of Philemon
and Baucis is copied from that of Lot and his wife. The Jews admit that
they had no communication with strangers, that their books were unknown
to the Greeks till the translation made by the order of Ptolemy. The
Jews were, long before that period, money-brokers and usurers among the
Greeks at Alexandria; but the Greeks never went to sell old clothes at
Jerusalem. It is evident that no people imitated the Jews, and also that
the Jews imitated or adopted many things from the Babylonians, the
Egyptians, and the Greeks.

All Jewish antiquities are sacred in our estimation, notwithstanding the
hatred and contempt in which we hold that people. We cannot, indeed,
believe them by reason, but we bring ourselves under subjection to the
Jews by faith. There are about fourscore systems in existence on the
subject of their chronology, and a far greater number of ways of
explaining the events recorded in their histories; we know not which is
the true one, but we reserve our faith for it in store against the time
when that true one shall be discovered.

We have so many things to believe in this sensible and magnanimous
people, that all our faith is exhausted by them, and we have none left
for the prodigies with which the other nations abound. Rollin may go on
repeating to us the oracles of Apollo, and the miraculous achievements
of Semiramis; he may continue to transcribe all that has been narrated
of the justice of those ancient Scythians who so frequently pillaged
Africa, and occasionally ate men for their breakfast; yet sensible and
well-educated people will still feel and express some degree of
incredulity.

What I most admire in our modern compilers is the judgment and zeal with
which they prove to us, that whatever happened in former ages, in the
most extensive and powerful empires of the world, took place solely for
the instruction of the inhabitants of Palestine. If the kings of
Babylon, in the course of their conquests, overrun the territories of
the Hebrew people, it is only to correct that people for their sins. If
the monarch, who has been commonly named Cyrus, becomes master of
Babylon, it is that he may grant permission to some captive Jews to
return home. If Alexander conquers Darius, it is for the settlement of
some Jew old-clothesmen at Alexandria. When the Romans join Syria to
their vast dominions, and round their empire with the little district of
Judæa, this is still with a view to teach a moral lesson to the Jews.
The Arabs and the Turks appear upon the stage of the world solely for
the correction of this amiable people. We must acknowledge that they
have had an excellent education; never had any pupil so many preceptors.
Such is the utility of history.

But what is still more instructive is the exact justice which the clergy
have dealt out to all those sovereigns with whom they were dissatisfied.
Observe with what impartial candor St. Gregory of Nazianzen judges the
emperor Julian, the philosopher. He declares that that prince, who did
not believe in the existence of the devil, held secret communication
with that personage, and that, on a particular occasion, when the demons
appeared to him under the most hideous forms, and in the midst of the
most raging flames, he drove them away by making inadvertently the sign
of the cross.

He denominates him madman and wretch; he asserts that Julian immolated
young men and women every night in caves. Such is the description he
gives of the most candid and clement of men, and who never exercised the
slightest revenge against this same Gregory, notwithstanding the abuse
and invectives with which he pursued him throughout his reign.

To apologize for the guilty is a happy way of justifying calumny against
the innocent. Compensation is thus effected; and such compensation was
amply afforded by St. Gregory. The emperor Constantius, Julian's uncle
and predecessor, upon his accession to the throne, had massacred Julius,
his mother's brother, and his two sons, all three of whom had been
declared august; this was a system which he had adopted from his father.
He afterwards procured the assassination of Gallus, Julian's brother.
The cruelty which he thus displayed to his own family, he extended to
the empire at large; but he was a man of prayer, and, even at the
decisive battle with Maxentius, he was praying to God in a neighboring
church during the whole time in which the armies were engaged. Such was
the man who was eulogized by Gregory; and, if such is the way in which
the saints make us acquainted with the truth, what may we not expect
from the profane, particularly when they are ignorant, superstitious,
and irritable?

At the present day the study of history is occasionally applied to a
purpose somewhat whimsical and absurd. Certain charters of the time of
Dagobert are discovered and brought forward, the greater part of them of
a somewhat suspicious character in point of genuineness, and
ill-understood; and from these it is inferred, that customs, rights, and
prerogatives, which subsisted then, should be revived now. I would
recommend it to those who adopt this method of study and reasoning, to
say to the ocean, "You formerly extended to Aigues-Mortes, Fréjus,
Ravenna, and Ferrara. Return to them immediately."


SECTION III.

_Of the Certainty of History._

All certainty which does not consist in mathematical demonstration is
nothing more than the highest probability; there is no other historical
certainty.

When Marco Polo described the greatness and population of China, being
the first, and for a time the only writer who had described them, he
could not obtain credit. The Portuguese, who for ages afterwards had
communication and commerce with that vast empire, began to render the
description probable. It is now a matter of absolute certainty; of that
certainty which arises from the unanimous deposition of a thousand
witnesses or different nations, unopposed by the testimony of a single
individual.

If merely two or three historians had described the adventure of King
Charles XII. when he persisted in remaining in the territories of his
benefactor, the sultan, in opposition to the orders of that monarch, and
absolutely fought, with the few domestics that attended his person,
against an army of janissaries and Tartars, I should have suspended my
judgment about its truth; but, having spoken to many who actually
witnessed the fact, and having never heard it called in question, I
cannot possibly do otherwise than believe it; because, after all,
although such conduct is neither wise nor common, there is nothing in it
contradictory to the laws of nature, or the character of the hero.

That which is in opposition to the ordinary course of nature ought not
to be believed, unless it is attested by persons evidently inspired by
the divine mind, and whose inspiration, indeed, it is impossible to
doubt. Hence we are justified in considering as a paradox the assertion
made under the article on "Certainty," in the great "Encyclopædia," that
we are as much bound to believe in the resuscitation of a dead man, if
all Paris were to affirm it, as to believe all Paris when it states that
we gained the battle of Fontenoy. It is clear that the evidence of all
Paris to a thing improbable can never be equal to that evidence in favor
of a probable one. These are the first principles of genuine logic. Such
a dictionary as the one in question should be consecrated only to truth.

_Uncertainty of History._

Periods of time are distinguished as fabulous and historical. But even
in the historical times themselves it is necessary to distinguish truths
from fables. I am not here speaking of fables, now universally admitted
to be such. There is no question, for example, respecting the prodigies
with which Livy has embellished, or rather defaced, his history. But
with respect to events generally admitted, how many reasons exist for
doubt!

Let it be recollected that the Roman republic was five hundred years
without historians; that Livy himself deplores the loss of various
public monuments or records, as almost all, he says, were destroyed in
the burning of Rome: "_Pleraque interiere_." Let it be considered that,
in the first three hundred years, the art of writing was very uncommon:
"_Raræ per eadem tempora literæ_." Reason will be then seen for
entertaining doubt on all those events which do not correspond with the
usual order of human affairs.

Can it be considered very likely that Romulus, the grandson of the king
of the Sabines, was compelled to carry off the Sabine women in order to
obtain for his people wives? Is the history of Lucretia highly probable;
can we easily believe, on the credit of Livy, that the king Porsenna
betook himself to flight, full of admiration for the Romans, because a
fanatic had pledged himself to assassinate him? Should we not rather be
inclined to rely upon Polybius, who was two hundred years earlier than
Livy? Polybius informs us that Porsenna subjugated the Romans. This is
far more probable than the adventure of Scævola's burning off his hand
for failing in the attempt to assassinate him. I would have defied
Poltrot to do as much.

Does the adventure of Regulus, inclosed within a hogshead or tub stuck
round with iron spikes, deserve belief? Would not Polybius, a
contemporary, have recorded it had it been true? He says not a single
word upon the subject. Is not this a striking presumption that the story
was trumped up long afterwards to gratify the popular hatred against the
Carthaginians?

Open "Moréri's Dictionary," at the article on "Regulus." He informs you
that the torments inflicted on that Roman are recorded in Livy. The
particular decade, however, in which Livy would have recorded it, if at
all, is lost; and in lieu of it, we have only the supplement of
Freinsheim; and thus it appears that Dictionary has merely cited a
German writer of the seventeenth century, under the idea of citing a
Roman of the Augustan age. Volumes might be composed out of all the
celebrated events which have been generally admitted, but which may be
more fairly doubted. But the limits allowed for this article will not
permit us to enlarge.

_Whether Temples, Festivals, Annual Ceremonies, and even Medals, are
Historic Proofs._

We might be naturally led to imagine that a monument raised by any
nation in celebration of a particular event, would attest the certainty
of that event; if, however, these monuments were not erected by
contemporaries, or if they celebrate events that carry with them but
little probability, they may often be regarded as proving nothing more
than a wish to consecrate a popular opinion.

The rostral column, erected in Rome by the contemporaries of Duilius, is
undoubtedly a proof of the naval victory obtained by Duilius; but does
the statue of the augur Nævius, who is said to have divided a large
flint with a razor, prove that Nævius in reality performed that prodigy?
Were the statues of Ceres and Triptolemus, at Athens, decisive evidences
that Ceres came down from I know not what particular planet, to instruct
the Athenians in agriculture? Or does the famous Laocoon, which exists
perfect to the present day, furnish incontestable evidence of the truth
of the story of the Trojan horse?

Ceremonies and annual festivals observed universally throughout any
nation, are, in like manner, no better proofs of the reality of the
events to which they are attributed. The festival of Orion, carried on
the back of a dolphin, was celebrated among the Romans as well as the
Greeks. That of Faunus was in celebration of his adventure with Hercules
and Omphale, when that god, being enamored of Omphale, mistook the bed
of Hercules for that of his mistress.

The famous feast of the Lupercals was instituted in honor of the
she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus.

What was the origin of the feast of Orion, which was observed on the
fifth of the ides of May? It was neither more nor less than the
following adventure: Hyreus once entertained at his house the gods
Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury, and when his high and mighty guests were
about to depart, the worthy host, who had no wife, and was very desirous
of having a son, lamented his unfortunate fate, and expressed his
anxious desire to the three divinities. We dare not exactly detail what
they did to the hide of an ox which Hyreus had killed for their
entertainment; however, they afterwards covered the well-soaked hide
with a little earth; and thence, at the end of nine months, was born
Orion.

Almost all the Roman, Syrian, Grecian, and Egyptian festivals, were
founded on similar legends, as well as the temples and statues of
ancient heroes. They were monuments consecrated by credulity to error.

One of our most ancient monuments is the statue of St. Denis carrying
his head in his arms.

Even a medal, and a contemporary medal, is sometimes no proof. How many
medals has flattery struck in celebration of battles very indecisive in
themselves, but thus exalted into victories; and of enterprises, in
fact, baffled and abortive, and completed only in the inscription on the
medal? Finally, during the war in 1740, between the Spaniards and the
English, was there not a medal struck, attesting the capture of
Carthagena by Admiral Vernon, although that admiral was obliged to raise
the siege?

Medals are then unexceptionable testimonies only when the event they
celebrate is attested by contemporary authors; these evidences thus
corroborating each other, verify the event described.

_Should an Historian ascribe Fictitious Speeches to his Characters, and
sketch Portraits of them?_

If on any particular occasion the commander of an army, or a public
minister, has spoken in a powerful and impressive manner, characteristic
of his genius and his age, his discourse should unquestionably be given
with the most literal exactness. Speeches of this description are
perhaps the most valuable part of history. But for what purpose
represent a man as saying what he never did say? It would be just as
correct to attribute to him acts which he never performed. It is a
fiction imitated from Homer; but that which is fiction in a poem, in
strict language, is a lie in the historian. Many of the ancients adopted
the method in question, which merely proves that many of the ancients
were fond of parading their eloquence at the expense of truth.

_Of Historical Portraiture._

Portraits, also, frequently manifest a stronger desire for display, than
to communicate information. Contemporaries are justifiable in drawing
the portraits of statesmen with whom they have negotiated, or of
generals under whom they have fought. But how much is it to be
apprehended that the pencil will in many cases be guided by the
feelings? The portraits given by Lord Clarendon appear to be drawn with
more impartiality, gravity, and judgment, than those which we peruse
with so much delight in Cardinal de Retz.

But to attempt to paint the ancients; to elaborate in this way the
development of their minds; to regard events as characters in which we
may accurately read the most sacred feelings and intents of their
hearts--this is an undertaking of no ordinary difficulty and
discrimination, although as frequently conducted, both childish and
trifling.

_Of Cicero's Maxim Concerning History, that an Historian should never
dare to relate a Falsehood or to Conceal a Truth._

The first part of this precept is incontestable; we must stop for a
moment to examine the other. If a particular truth may be of any service
to the state, your silence is censurable. But I will suppose you to
write the history of a prince who had reposed in you a secret--ought you
to reveal that secret? Ought you to say to all posterity what you would
be criminal in disclosing to a single individual? Should the duty of an
historian prevail over the higher and more imperative duty of a man?

I will suppose again, that you have witnessed a failing or weakness
which has not had the slightest influence on public affairs--ought you
to publish such weakness? In such a case history becomes satire.

It must be allowed, indeed, that the greater part of anecdote writers
are more indiscreet than they are useful. But what opinion must we
entertain of those impudent compilers who appear to glory in scattering
about them calumny and slander, and print and sell scandals as Voisin
sold poisons?

_Of Satirical History._

If Plutarch censured Herodotus for not having sufficiently extolled the
fame of some of the Grecian cities, and for omitting many known facts
worthy of being recorded, how much more censurable are certain of our
modern writers, who, without any of the merits of Herodotus, impute both
to princes and to nations acts of the most odious character, without the
slightest proof or evidence? The history of the war in 1741 has been
written in England; and it relates, "that at the battle of Fontenoy the
French fired at the English balls and pieces of glass which had been
prepared with poison; and that the duke of Cumberland sent to the king
of France a box full of those alleged poisonous articles, which had been
found in the bodies of the wounded English." The same author adds, that
the French having lost in that battle forty thousand men, the parliament
issued an order to prevent people from talking on the subject, under
pain of corporal punishment.

The fraudulent memoirs published not long since under the name of Madame
de Maintenon, abound with similar absurdities. We are told in them, that
at the siege of Lille the allies threw placards into the city,
containing these words: "Frenchmen, be comforted--Maintenon shall never
be your queen."

Almost every page is polluted by false statements and abuse of the royal
family and other leading families in the kingdom, without the author's
making out the smallest probability to give a color to his calumnies.
This is not writing history; it is writing slanders which deserve the
pillory.

A vast number of works have been printed in Holland, under the name of
history, of which the style is as vulgar and coarse as the abuse, and
the facts as false as they are ill-narrated. This, it has been observed,
is a bad fruit of the noble tree of liberty. But if the contemptible
authors of this trash have the liberty thus to deceive their readers, it
becomes us here to take the liberty to undeceive them.

A thirst for despicable gain, and the insolence of vulgar and grovelling
manners, were the only motives which led that Protestant refugee from
Languedoc, of the name of Langlevieux, but commonly called La Beaumelle,
to attempt the most infamous trick that ever disgraced literature. He
sold to Eslinger, the bookseller of Frankfort, in 1751, for seventeen
louis d'or, the "History of the Age of Louis XIV.," which is not his;
and, either to make it believed that he was the proprietor, or to earn
his money, he loaded it with abusive and abominable notes against Louis
XIV., his son, and his grandson, the duke of Burgundy, whom he abuses in
the most unmeasured terms, and calls a traitor to his grandfather and
his country. He pours upon the duke of Orleans, the regent, calumnies at
once the most horrible and the most absurd; no person of consequence is
spared, and yet no person of consequence did he ever know. He retails
against the marshals Villars and Villeroi, against ministers, and even
against ladies, all the petty, dirty, and scandalous tales that could be
collected from the lowest taverns and wine-houses; and he speaks of the
greatest princes as if they were amenable to himself, and under his own
personal jurisdiction. He expresses himself, indeed, as if he were a
formal and authorized judge of kings: "Give me," says he, "a Stuart, and
I will make him king of England."

This most ridiculous and abominable conduct, proceeding from an author
obscure and unknown, has incurred no prosecution; it would have been
severely punished in a man whose words would have carried any weight.
But we must here observe, that these works of darkness frequently
circulate through all Europe; they are sold at the fairs of Frankfort
and Leipsic, and the whole of the North is overrun with them.
Foreigners, who are not well informed, derive from books of this
description their knowledge of modern history. German authors are not
always sufficiently on their guard against memoirs of this character,
but employ them as materials; which has been the case with the memoirs
of Pontis, Montbrun, Rochefort, and Pordac; with all the pretended
political testaments of ministers of state, which have proceeded from
the pen of forgery; with the "Royal Tenth" of Boisguillebert, impudently
published under the name of Marshal Vauban; and with innumerable
compilations of _anas_ and anecdotes.

History is sometimes even still more shamefully abused in England. As
there are always two parties in furious hostility against each other,
until some common danger for a season unites them, the writers of one
faction condemn everything that the others approve. The same individual
is represented as a Cato and a Catiline. How is truth to be extricated
from this adulation and satire? Perhaps there is only one rule to be
depended upon, which is, to believe all the good which the historian of
a party ventures to allow to the leaders of the opposite faction; and
all the ills which he ventures to impute to the chiefs of his own--a
rule, of which neither party can severely complain.

With regard to memoirs actually written by agents in the events
recorded, as those of Clarendon, Ludlow, and Burnet, in England, and de
la Rochefoucauld and de Retz in France, if they agree, they are true; if
they contradict each other, doubt them.

With respect to _anas_ and anecdotes, there may perhaps be one in a
hundred of them that contain some shadow of truth.


SECTION IV.

_Of the Method or Manner of Writing History, and of Style._

We have said so much upon this subject, that we must here say very
little. It is sufficiently known and fully admitted, that the method and
style of Livy--his gravity, and instructive eloquence, are suitable to
the majesty of the Roman republic; that Tacitus is more calculated to
portray tyrants, Polybius to give lessons on war, and Dionysius of
Halicarnassus to investigate antiquities.

But, while he forms himself on the general model of these great masters,
a weighty responsibility is attached to the modern historian from which
they were exempt. He is required to give more minute details, facts more
completely authenticated, correct dates, precise authorities, more
attention to customs, laws, manners, commerce, finance, agriculture, and
population. It is with history, as it is with mathematics and natural
philosophy; the field of it is immensely enlarged. The more easy it is
to compile newspapers, the more difficult it is at the present day to
write history.

Daniel thought himself a historian, because he transcribed dates and
narratives of battles, of which I can understand nothing. He should have
informed me of the rights of the nation, the rights of the chief
corporate establishments in it; its laws, usages, manners, with the
alterations by which they have been affected in the progress of time.
This nation might not improperly address him in some such language as
the following:--I want from you my own history rather than that of Louis
le Gros and Louis Hutin; you tell me, copying from some old,
unauthenticated, and carelessly-written chronicle, that when Louis VIII.
was attacked by a mortal disease, and lay languishing and powerless, the
physicians ordered the more than half-dead monarch to take to his bed a
blooming damsel, who might cherish the few sparks of remaining life; and
that the pious king rejected the unholy advice with indignation. Alas!
Daniel, you are unacquainted, it seems, with the Italian
proverb--"_Donna ignuda manda l'uomo sotto la terra_." You ought to
possess a little stronger tincture of political and natural history.

The history of a foreign country should be formed on a different model
to that of our own.

If we compose a history of France, we are under no necessity to describe
the course of the Seine and the Loire; but if we publish a history of
the conquests of the Portuguese in Asia, a topographical description of
the recently explored country is required. It is desirable that we
should, as it were, conduct the reader by the hand round Africa, and
along the coasts of Persia and India; and it is expected that we should
treat with information and judgment, of manners, laws, and customs so
new to Europe.

We have a great variety of histories of the establishment of the
Portuguese in India, written by our countrymen, but not one of them has
made us acquainted with the different governments of that country, with
its religious antiquities, Brahmins, disciples of St. John, Guebers, and
Banians. Some letters of Xavier and his successors have, it is true,
been preserved to us. We have had histories of the Indies composed at
Paris, from the accounts of those missionaries who were unacquainted
with the language of the Brahmins. We have it repeated, in a hundred
works, that the Indians worship the devil. The chaplains of a company of
merchants quit our country under these impressions, and, as soon as they
perceive on the coast some symbolical figures, they fail not to write
home that they are the portraits and likenesses of the devil, that they
are in the devil's empire, and that they are going to engage in battle
with him. They do not reflect that we are the real worshippers of the
devil Mammon, and that we travel six thousand leagues from our native
land to offer our vows at his shrine, and to obtain the grant of some
portion of his treasures.

As to those who hire themselves out at Paris to some bookseller in the
Rue de St. Jacques, and at so much per job, and who are ordered to write
a history of Japan, Canada, or the Canaries, as the case requires and
opportunity suggests, from the memoirs of a few Capuchin friars--to such
I have nothing to say.

It is sufficient, if it be clearly understood, that the method which
would be proper in writing a history of our own country is not suitable
in describing the discoveries of the new world; that we should not write
on a small city as on a great empire; and that the private history of a
prince should be composed in a very different manner from the history of
France and England.

If you have nothing to tell us, but that on the banks of the Oxus and
the Jaxartes, one barbarian has been succeeded by another barbarian, in
what respect do you benefit the public?

These rules are well known; but the art of writing history well will
always be very uncommon. It obviously requires a style grave, pure,
varied, and smooth. But we may say with respect to rules for writing
history, as in reference to those for all the intellectual arts--there
are many precepts, but few masters.


SECTION V.

_History of the Jewish Kings, and of the "Paralipomena."_

Every nation, as soon as it was able to write, has written its own
history, and the Jews have accordingly written theirs. Before they had
kings, they lived under a theocracy; it was their destiny to be governed
by God himself.

When the Jews were desirous of having a king, like the adjoining
nations, the prophet Samuel, who was exceedingly interested in
preventing it, declared to them, on the part of God, that they were
rejecting God himself. Thus the Jewish theocracy ceased when the
monarchy commenced.

We may therefore remark, without the imputation of blasphemy, that the
history of the Jewish kings was written like that of other nations, and
that God did not take the pains Himself to dictate the history of a
people whom He no longer governed.

We advance this opinion with the greatest diffidence. What may perhaps
be considered as confirming it, is, that the "Paralipomena" very
frequently contradict the Book of Kings, both with respect to chronology
and facts, just as profane historians sometimes contradict one another.
Moreover, if God always wrote the history of the Jews, it seems only
consistent and natural to think that He writes it still; for the Jews
are always His cherished people. They are on some future day to be
converted, and it seems that whenever that event happens, they will have
as complete a right to consider the history of their dispersion as
sacred, as they have now to say, that God wrote the history of their
kings.

We may be allowed here to make one reflection; which is, that as God was
for a very long period their king, and afterwards became their
historian, we are bound to entertain for all Jews the most profound
respect. There is not a single Jew broker, or slop-man, who is not
infinitely superior to Cæsar and Alexander. How can we avoid bending in
prostration before an old-clothes man, who proves to us that his history
has been written by God Himself, while the histories of Greece and Rome
have been transmitted to us merely by the profane hand of man?

If the style of the history of the kings, and of the "Paralipomena," is
divine, it may nevertheless be true that the acts recorded in these
histories are not divine. David murders Uriah; Ishbosheth and
Mephibosheth are murdered; Absalom murders Ammon; Joab murders Absalom;
Solomon murders his brother Adonijah; Baasha murders Nadab; Zimri
murders Ela; Omri murders Zimri; Ahab murders Naboth; Jehu murders Ahab
and Joram; the inhabitants of Jerusalem murder Amaziah, son of Joash;
Shallum, son of Jabesh, murders Zachariah, son of Jeroboam; Menahhem
murders Shallum, son of Jabesh; Pekah, son of Remaliah, murders
Pekahiah, son of Manehem; and Hoshea, son of Elah, murders Pekah, son of
Remaliah. We pass over, in silence, many other minor murders. It must be
acknowledged, that, if the Holy Spirit did write this history, He did
not choose a subject particularly edifying.


SECTION VI.

_Of bad Actions which have been consecrated or excused in History._

It is but too common for historians to praise very depraved and
abandoned characters, who have done service either to a dominant sect,
or to their nation at large. The praises thus bestowed, come perhaps
from a loyal and zealous citizen; but zeal of this description is
injurious to the great society of mankind. Romulus murders his brother,
and he is made a god. Constantine cuts the throat of his son, strangles
his wife, and murders almost all his family: he has been eulogized in
general councils, but history should ever hold up such barbarities to
detestation. It is undoubtedly fortunate for us that Clovis was a
Catholic. It is fortunate for the Anglican church that Henry VIII.
abolished monks, but we must at the same time admit that Clovis and
Henry VIII. were monsters of cruelty.

When first the Jesuit Berruyer, who although a Jesuit, was a fool,
undertook to paraphrase the Old and New Testaments in the style of the
lowest populace, with no other intention than that of having them read;
he scattered some flowers of rhetoric over the two-edged knife which the
Jew Ehud thrust up to the hilt in the stomach of the king Eglon; and
over the sabre with which Judith cut off the head of Holofernes after
having prostituted herself to his pleasures; and also over many other
acts recorded, of a similar description. The parliament, respecting the
Bible which narrates these histories, nevertheless condemned the Jesuit
who extolled them, and ordered the Old and New Testaments to be
burned:--I mean merely those of the Jesuit.

But as the judgments of mankind are ever different in similar cases, the
same thing happened to Bayle in circumstances totally different. He was
condemned for not praising all the actions of David, king of the
province of Judæa. A man of the name of Jurieu, a refugee preacher in
Holland, associated with some other refugee preachers, were desirous of
obliging him to recant. But how could he recant with reference to facts
delivered in the scripture? Had not Bayle some reason to conclude that
all the facts recorded in the Jewish books are not the actions of
saints; that David, like other men, had committed some criminal acts;
and that if he is called a man after God's own heart, he is called so in
consequence of his penitence, and not of his crimes?

Let us disregard names and confine our consideration to things only. Let
us suppose, that during the reign of Henry IV. a clergyman of the League
party secretly poured out a phial of oil on the head of a shepherd of
Brie; that the shepherd comes to court; that the clergyman presents him
to Henry IV. as an excellent violin player who can completely drive away
all care and melancholy; that the king makes him his equerry, and
bestows on him one of his daughters in marriage; that afterwards, the
king having quarrelled with the shepherd, the latter takes refuge with
one of the princes of Germany, his father-in-law's enemy; that he
enlists and arms six hundred banditti overwhelmed by debt and
debauchery; that with this regiment of brigands he rushes to the field,
slays friends as well as enemies, exterminating all, even to women with
children at the breast, in order to prevent a single individual's
remaining to give intelligence of the horrid butchery. I farther suppose
this same shepherd of Brie to become king of France after the death of
Henry IV.; that he procures the murder of that king's grandson, after
having invited him to sit at meat at his own table, and delivers over to
death seven other younger children of his king and benefactor. Who is
the man that will not conceive the shepherd of Brie to act rather
harshly?

Commentators are agreed that the adultery of David, and his murder of
Uriah, are faults which God pardoned. We may therefore conclude that the
massacres above mentioned are faults which God also pardoned.

However, Bayle had no quarter given him; but at length some preachers at
London having compared George II. to David, one of that monarch's
servants prints and publishes a small book, in which he censures the
comparison. He examines the whole conduct of David; he goes infinitely
farther than Bayle, and treats David with more severity than Tacitus
applies to Domitian. This book did not raise in England the slightest
murmur; every reader felt that bad actions are always bad; that God may
pardon them when repentance is proportioned to guilt, but that certainly
no man can ever approve of them.

There was more reason, therefore, prevailing in England than there was
in Holland in the time of Bayle. We now perceive clearly and without
difficulty, that we ought not to hold up as a model of sanctity what, in
fact, deserves the severest punishment; and we see with equal clearness
that, as we ought not to consecrate guilt, so we ought not to believe
absurdity.




HONOR.


The author of the "Spirit of Laws" has founded his system on the idea
that virtue is the principle of a republican government, and honor that
of mom archism. Is there virtue then without honor, and how is a
republic established in virtue?

Let us place before the reader's eyes that which has been said in an
able little book upon this subject. Pamphlets soon sink into oblivion.
Truth ought not to be lost; it should be consigned to works possessing
durability.

"Assuredly republics have never been formed on a theoretical principle
of virtue. The public interest being opposed to the domination of an
individual, the spirit of self-importance, and the ambition of every
person, serve to curb ambition and the inclination to rapacity, wherever
they may appear. The pride of each citizen watches over that of his
neighbor, and no person would willingly be the slave of another's
caprice. Such are the feelings which establish republics, and which
preserve them. It is ridiculous to imagine that there must be more
virtue in a Grison than in a Spaniard."

That honor can be the sole principle of monarchies is a no less
chimerical idea, and the author shows it to be so himself, without being
aware of it. "The nature of honor," says he, in chapter vii. of book
iii., "is to demand preferences and distinctions. It, therefore,
naturally suits a monarchical government."

Was it not on this same principle, that the Romans demanded the
prætorship, consulship, ovation, and triumph in their republic? These
were preferences and distinctions well worth the titles and preferences
purchased in monarchies, and for which there is often a regular fixed
price.

This remark proves, in our opinion, that the "Spirit of Laws," although
sparkling with wit, and commendable by its respect for the laws and
hatred of superstition and rapine, is founded entirely upon false views.

Let us add, that it is precisely in courts that there is always least
honor:

     _L'ingannare, il mentir, la frode, il furto,_
     _E la rapina di pictà vestita,_
     _Crescer coi damno e precipizio altrui,_
     _E fare a se de l'altrui biasmo onore,_
     _Son le virtù di quella gente infidà._
                        --PASTOR FIDO, atto v., scena i.

     _Ramper avec bassesse en affectant l'audace,_
     _S'engraisser de rapine en attestant les lois,_
     _Étouffer en secret son ami qu'on embrasse._
     _Voilà l'honneur qui règne à la suite des rois._

     To basely crawl, yet wear a face of pride;
     To rob the public, yet o'er law preside;
     Salute a friend, yet sting in the embrace--
     Such is the _honor_ which in courts takes place.

Indeed, it is in courts, that men devoid of honor often attain to the
highest dignities; and it is in republics that a known dishonorable
citizen is seldom trusted by the people with public concerns.

The celebrated saying of the regent, duke of Orleans, is sufficient to
destroy the foundation of the "Spirit of Laws": "This is a perfect
courtier--he has neither temper nor honor."




HUMILITY.


Philosophers have inquired, whether humility is a virtue; but virtue or
not, every one must agree that nothing is more rare. The Greeks called
it "_tapeinosis_" or "tapeineia." It is strongly recommended in the
fourth book of the "Laws of Plato": he rejects the proud and would
multiply the humble.

Epictetus, in five places, preaches humility: "If thou passest for a
person of consequence in the opinion of some people, distrust thyself.
No lifting up of thy eye-brows. Be nothing in thine own eyes--if thou
seekest to please, thou art lost. Give place to all men; prefer them to
thyself; assist them all." We see by these maxims that never Capuchin
went so far as Epictetus.

Some theologians, who had the misfortune to be proud, have pretended
that humility cost nothing to Epictetus, who was a slave; and that he
was humble by station, as a doctor or a Jesuit may be proud by station.

But what will they say of Marcus Antoninus, who on the throne
recommended humility? He places Alexander and his muleteer on the same
line. He said that the vanity of pomp is only a bone thrown in the midst
of dogs; that to do good, and to patiently hear himself calumniated,
constitute the virtue of a king.

Thus the master of the known world recommended humility; but propose
humility to a musician, and see how he will laugh at Marcus Aurelius.

Descartes, in his treatise on the "Passions of the Soul," places
humility among their number, who--if we may personify this quality--did
not expect to be regarded as a passion. He also distinguishes between
virtuous and vicious humility.

But we leave to philosophers more enlightened than ourselves the care of
explaining this doctrine, and will confine ourselves to saying, that
humility is "the modesty of the soul."

It is the antidote to pride. Humility could not prevent Rousseau from
believing that he knew more of music than those to whom he taught it;
but it could induce him to believe that he was not superior to Lulli in
recitative.

The reverend father Viret, cordelier, theologian, and preacher, all
humble as he is, will always firmly believe that he knows more than
those who learn to read and write; but his Christian humility, his
modesty of soul, will oblige him to confess in the bottom of his heart
that he has written nothing but nonsense. Oh, brothers Nonnotte, Guyon,
Pantouillet, vulgar scribblers! be more humble, and always bear in
recollection "the modesty of the soul."




HYPATIA.


I will suppose that Madame Dacier had been the finest woman in Paris;
and that in the quarrel on the comparative merits of the ancients and
moderns, the Carmelites pretended that the poem of the Magdalen, written
by a Carmelite, was infinitely superior to Homer, and that it was an
atrocious impiety to prefer the "Iliad" to the verses of a monk. I will
take the additional liberty of supposing that the archbishop of Paris
took the part of the Carmelites against the governor of the city, a
partisan of the beautiful Madame Dacier, and that he excited the
Carmelites to massacre this fine woman in the church of Notre Dame, and
to drag her, naked and bloody, to the Place Maubert--would not everybody
say that the archbishop of Paris had done a very wicked action, for
which he ought to do penance?

This is precisely the history of Hypatia. She taught Homer and Plato, in
Alexandria, in the time of Theodosius II. St. Cyril incensed the
Christian populace against her, as it is related by Damasius and Suidas,
and clearly proved by the most learned men of the age, such as Bruker,
La Croze, and Basnage, as is very judiciously exposed in the great
"_Dictionnaire Encyclopédique_," in the article on "Éclectisme."

A man whose intentions are no doubt very good, has printed two volumes
against this article of the "Encyclopædia." Two volumes against two
pages, my friends, are too much. I have told you a hundred times you
multiply being without necessity. Two lines against two volumes would be
quite sufficient; but write not even these two lines.

I am content with remarking, that St. Cyril was a man of parts; that he
suffered his zeal to carry him too far; that when we strip beautiful
women, it is not to massacre them; that St. Cyril, no doubt, asked
pardon of God for this abominable action; and that I pray the father of
mercies to have pity on his soul. He wrote the two volumes against
"Éclectisme," also inspires me with infinite commiseration.




IDEA.


SECTION I.

What is an idea?

It is an image painted upon my brain.

Are all your thoughts, then, images?

Certainly; for the most abstract thoughts are only the consequences of
all the objects that I have perceived. I utter the word "being" in
general, only because I have known particular beings; I utter the word
"infinity," only because I have seen certain limits, and because I push
back those limits in my mind to a greater and still greater distance, as
far as I am able. I have ideas in my head only because I have images.

And who is the painter of this picture?

It is not myself; I cannot draw with sufficient skill; the being that
made me, makes my ideas.

And how do you know that the ideas are not made by yourself?

Because they frequently come to me involuntarily when I am awake, and
always without my consent when I dream.

You are persuaded, then, that your ideas belong to you only in the same
manner as your hairs, which grow and become white, and fall off, without
your having anything at all to do with the matter?

Nothing can possibly be clearer; all that I can do is to frizzle, cut,
and powder them; but I have nothing to do with producing them.

You must, then, I imagine, be of Malebranche's opinion, that we see all
in God?

I am at least certain of this, that if we do not see things in the Great
Being, we see them in consequence of His powerful and immediate action.

And what was the nature or process of this action?

I have already told you repeatedly, in the course of our conversation,
that I do not know a single syllable about the subject, and that God has
not communicated His secret to any one. I am completely ignorant of that
which makes my heart beat, and my blood flow through my veins; I am
ignorant of the principle of all my movements, and yet you seem to
expect how I should explain how I feel and how I think. Such an
expectation is unreasonable.

But you at least know whether your faculty of having ideas is joined to
extension?

Not in the least; It is true that Tatian, in his discourse to the
Greeks, says the soul is evidently composed of a body. Irenæus, in the
twenty-sixth chapter of his second book, says, "The Lord has taught that
our souls preserve the figure of our body in order to retain the memory
of it." Tertullian asserts, in his second book on the soul, that it is a
body. Arnobius, Lactantius, Hilary, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ambrose, are
precisely of the same opinion. It is pretended that other fathers of the
Church assert that the soul is without extension, and that in this
respect they adopt the opinion of Plato; this, however, may well be
doubted. With respect to myself, I dare not venture to form an opinion;
I see nothing but obscurity and incomprehensibility in either system;
and, after a whole life's meditation on the subject, I am not advanced a
single step beyond where I was on the first day.

The subject, then, was not worth thinking about?

That is true; the man who enjoys knows more of it, or at least knows it
better, than he who reflects; he is more happy. But what is it that you
would have? It depended not, I repeat, upon myself whether I should
admit or reject all those ideas which have crowded into my brain in
conflict with each other, and actually converted my medullary magazine
into their field of battle. After a hard-fought contest between them, I
have obtained nothing but uncertainty from the spoils.

It is a melancholy thing to possess so many ideas, and yet to have no
precise knowledge of the nature of ideas?

It is, I admit; but it is much more melancholy, and inexpressibly more
foolish, for a man to believe he knows what in fact he does not.

But, if you do not positively know what an idea is, if you are ignorant
whence ideas come, you at least know by what they come?

Yes; just in the same way as the ancient Egyptians, who, without knowing
the source of the Nile, knew perfectly well that its waters reached them
by its bed. We know perfectly that ideas come to us by the senses; but
we never know whence they come. The source of this Nile will never be
discovered.

If it is certain that all ideas are given by means of the senses, why
does the Sorbonne, which has so long adopted this doctrine from
Aristotle, condemn it with so much virulence in Helvetius?

Because the Sorbonne is composed of theologians.


SECTION II.

_All in God._

In God we live and move and have our being.
                            --ST. PAUL, Acts xvii, 28.


Aratus, who is thus quoted and approved by St. Paul, made this
confession of faith, we perceive among the Greeks.

The virtuous Cato says the same thing: "_Jupiter est quodcumque vides
quocumque moveris_."--Lucan's "_Pharsalia_" ix, 580. "Whate'er we see,
whate'er we feel, is Jove."

Malebranche is the commentator on Aratus, St. Paul, and Cato. He
succeeded, in the first instance, in showing the errors of the senses
and imagination; but when he attempted to develop the grand system, that
all is in God, all his readers declared the commentary to be more
obscure than the text. In short, having plunged into this abyss, his
head became bewildered; he held conversations with the Word; he was made
acquainted with what the Word had done in other planets; he became, in
truth, absolutely mad; a circumstance well calculated to excite
apprehension in our own minds, apt as we some of us are to attempt
soaring, upon our weak and puny opinions, very far beyond our reach.

In order to comprehend the notion of Malebranche, such as he held it
while he retained his faculties, we must admit nothing that we do not
clearly conceive, and reject what we do not understand. Attempting to
explain an obscurity by obscurities, is to act like an idiot.

I feel decidedly that my first ideas and my sensations have come to me
without any co-operation or volition on my part. I clearly see that I
cannot give myself a single idea. I cannot give myself anything. I have
received everything. The objects which surround me cannot, of
themselves, give me either idea or sensation; for how is it possible for
a little particle of matter to possess the faculty of producing a
thought?

I am therefore irresistibly led to conclude that the Eternal Being, who
bestows everything, gives me my ideas, in whatever manner this may be
done. But what is an idea, what is a sensation, a volition, etc.? It is
myself perceiving, myself feeling, myself willing.

We see, in short, that what is called an idea is no more a real being
than there is a real being called motion, although there are bodies
moved. In the same manner there is not any particular being called
memory, imagination, judgment; but we ourselves remember, imagine, and
judge.

The truth of all this, it must be allowed, is sufficiently plain and
trite; but it is necessary to repeat and inculcate such truth, as the
opposite errors are more trite still.

_Laws of Nature._

How, let us now ask, would the Eternal Being, who formed all, produce
all those various modes or qualities which we perceive in organized
bodies?

Did He introduce two beings in a grain of wheat, one of which should
produce germination in the other? Did He introduce two beings in the
composition of a stag, one of which should produce swiftness in the
other? Certainly not. All that we know on the subject is that the grain
is endowed with the faculty of vegetating, and the stag with that of
speed.

There is evidently a grand mathematical principle directing all nature,
and affecting everything produced. The flying of birds, the swimming of
fishes, the walking or running of quadrupeds, are visible effects of
known laws of motion. "_Mens agitat molem_." Can the sensations and
ideas of those animals, then, be anything more than the admirable
effects or mathematical laws more refined and less obvious?

_Organisation of the Senses and Ideas._

It is by these general and comprehensive laws that every animal is
impelled to seek its appropriate food. We are naturally, therefore, led
to conjecture that there is a law by which it has the idea of this food,
and without which it would not go in search of it.

The eternal intelligence has made all the actions of an animal depend
upon a certain principle; the eternal intelligence, therefore, has made
the sensations which cause those actions depend on the same principle.

Would the author of nature have disposed and adjusted those admirable
instruments, the senses, with so divine a skill; would he have exhibited
such astonishing adaptation between the eyes and light; between the
atmosphere and the ears, had it, after all, been necessary to call in
the assistance of other agency to complete his work? Nature always acts
by the shortest ways. Protracted processes indicate want of skill;
multiplicity of springs, and complexity of co-operation are the result
of weakness. We cannot but believe, therefore, that one main spring
regulates the whole system.

_The Great Being Does Everything._

Not merely are we unable to give ourselves sensations, we cannot even
imagine any beyond those which we have actually experienced. Let all the
academies of Europe propose a premium for him who shall imagine a new
sense; no one will ever gain that premium. We can do nothing, then, of
our mere selves, whether there be an invisible and intangible being
enclosed in our brain or diffused throughout our body, or whether there
be not; and it must be admitted, upon every system, that the author of
nature has given us all that we possess--organs, sensations, and the
ideas which proceed from them.

As we are thus secured under His forming hand, Malebranche,
notwithstanding all his errors, had reason to say philosophically, that
we are in God and that we see all in God; as St. Paul used the same
language in a theological sense, and Aratus and Cato in a moral one.

What then are we to understand by the words seeing all in God? They are
either words destitute of meaning, or they mean that God gives us all
our ideas.

What is the meaning of receiving an idea? We do not create it when we
receive it; it is not, therefore, so unphilosophical as has been
thought, to say it is God who produces the ideas in my head, as it is He
who produces motion in my whole body. Everything is an operation of God
upon His creatures.

_How is Everything an Action of God?_

There is in nature only one universal, eternal, and active principle.
There cannot be two such principles; for they would either be alike or
different. If they are different, they destroy one another; if they are
alike, it is the same as if they were only one. The unity of design,
visible through the grand whole in all its infinite variety, announces
one single principle, and that principle must act upon all being, or it
ceases to be a universal opinion.

If it acts upon all being, it acts upon all the modes of all being.
There is not, therefore, a single remnant, a single mode, a single idea,
which is not the immediate effect of a universal cause perpetually
present.

The matter of the universe, therefore, belongs to God, as much as the
ideas and the ideas as much as the matter. To say that anything is out
of Him would be saying that there is something out of the vast whole.
God being the universal principle of all things, all, therefore, exists
in Him, and by Him.

The system includes that of "physical premotion," but in the same manner
as an immense wheel includes a small one that endeavors to fly off from
it. The principle which we have just been unfolding is too vast to admit
of any particular and detailed view.

Physical premotion occupies the great supreme with all the changing
vagaries which take place in the head of an individual Jansenist or
Molinist; we, on the contrary, occupy the Being of Beings only with the
grand and general laws of the universe. Physical premotion makes five
propositions a matter of attention and occupation to God, which interest
only some lay-sister, the sweeper of a convent; while we attribute to
Him employment of the most simple and important description--the
arrangement of the whole system of the universe.

Physical premotion is founded upon that subtle and truly Grecian
principle, that if a thinking being can give himself an idea, he would
augment his existence; but we do not, for our parts, know what is meant
by augmenting our being. We comprehend nothing about the matter. We say
that a thinking being might give himself new modes without adding to his
existence; just in the same manner as when we dance, our sliding steps
and crossings and attitudes give us no new existence; and to suppose
they do so would appear completely absurd. We agree only so far in the
system of physical premotion, that we are convinced we give ourselves
nothing.

Both the system of premotion and our own are abused, as depriving men of
their liberty. God forbid we should advocate such deprivation. To do
away with this imputation, it is only necessary to understand the
meaning of the word liberty. We shall speak of it in its proper place;
and in the meantime the world will go on as it has gone on hitherto,
without the Thomists or their opponents, or all the disputants in the
world, having any power to change it. In the same manner we shall always
have ideas, without precisely knowing what an idea is.




IDENTITY.


This scientific term signifies no more than "the same thing." It might
be correctly translated by "sameness." This subject is of considerably
more interest than may be imagined. All agree that the guilty person
only ought to be punished--the individual perpetrator, and no other. But
a man fifty years of age is not in reality the same individual as the
man of twenty; he retains no longer any of the parts which then formed
his body; and if he has lost the memory of past events, it is certain
that there is nothing left to unite his actual existence to an existence
which to him is lost.

I am the same person only by the consciousness of what I have been
combined with that of what I am; I have no consciousness of my past
being but through memory; memory alone, therefore, establishes the
identity, the sameness of my person.

We may, in truth, be naturally and aptly resembled to a river, all whose
waters pass away in perpetual change and flow. It is the same river as
to its bed, its banks, its source, its mouth, everything, in short, that
is not itself; but changing every moment its waters, which constitute
its very being, it has no identity; there is no sameness belonging to
the river.

Were there another Xerxes like him who lashed the Hellespont for
disobedience, and ordered for it a pair of handcuffs; and were the son
of this Xerxes to be drowned in the Euphrates, and the father desirous
of punishing that river for the death of his son, the Euphrates might
very reasonably say in its vindication: "Blame the waves that were
rolling on at the time your son was bathing; those waves belong not to
me, and form no part of me; they have passed on to the Persian Gulf; a
part is mixed with the salt water of that sea, and another part, exhaled
in vapor, has been impelled by a south-east wind to Gaul, and been
incorporated with endives and lettuces, which the Gauls have since used
in their salads; seize the culprit where you can find him."

It is the same with a tree, a branch of which broken by the wind might
have fractured the skull of your great grandfather. It is no longer the
same tree; all its parts have given way to others. The branch which
killed your great grandfather is no part of this tree; it exists no
longer.

It has been asked, then, how a man, who has totally lost his memory
before his death, and whose members have been changed into other
substances, can be punished for his faults or rewarded for his virtues
when he is no longer himself? I have read in a well known book the
following question and answer:

"Question. How can I be either rewarded or punished when I shall no
longer exist; when there will be nothing remaining of that which
constituted my person? It is only by means of memory that I am always
myself; after my death, a miracle will be necessary to restore it to
me--to enable me to reenter upon my lost existence.

"Answer. That is just as much as to say that if a prince had put to
death his whole family, in order to reign himself, and if he had
tyrannized over his subjects with the most wanton cruelty, he would be
exempted from punishment on pleading before God, 'I am not the offender;
I have lost my memory; you are under a mistake; I am no longer the same
person.' Do you think this sophism would pass with God?"

This answer is a highly commendable one; but it does not completely
solve the difficulty.

It would be necessary for this purpose, in the first place, to know
whether understanding and sensation are a faculty given by God to man,
or a created substance; a question which philosophy is too weak and
uncertain to decide.

It is necessary in the next place to know whether, if the soul be a
substance and has lost all knowledge of the evil it has committed, and
be, moreover, as perfect a stranger to what it has done with its own
body, as to all the other bodies of our universe--whether, in these
circumstances, it can or should, according to our manner of reasoning,
answer in another universe for actions of which it has not the slightest
knowledge; whether, in fact, a miracle would not be necessary to impart
to this soul the recollection it no longer possesses, to render it
consciously present to the crimes which have become obliterated and
annihilated in its mind, and make it the same person that it was on
earth; or whether God will judge it nearly in the same way in which the
presidents of human tribunals proceed, condemning a criminal, although
he may have completely forgotten the crimes he has actually committed.
He remembers them no longer; but they are remembered for him; he is
punished for the sake of the example. But God cannot punish a man after
his death with a view to his being an example to the living. No living
man knows whether the deceased is condemned or absolved. God, therefore,
can punish him only because he cherished and accomplished evil desires;
but if, when after death he presents himself before the tribunal of God,
he no longer entertains any such desire; if for a period of twenty years
he has totally forgotten that he did entertain such; if he is no longer
in any respect the same person; what is it that God will punish in him?

These are questions which appear beyond the compass of the human
understanding, and there seems to exist a necessity, in these
intricacies and labyrinths, of recurring to faith alone, which is always
our last asylum.

Lucretius had partly felt these difficulties, when in his third book
(verses 890-91) he describes a man trembling at the idea of what will
happen to him when he will no longer be the same man:

     _Nec radicitus e vita se tollit et evit;_
     _Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inscius ipse._

But Lucretius is not the oracle to be addressed, in order to obtain any
discoveries of the future.

The celebrated Toland, who wrote his own epitaph, concluded it with
these words: "_Idem futurus Tolandus nunquam_"--"He will never again be
the same Toland."

However, it may be presumed that God would have well known how to find
and restore him, had such been his good pleasure; and it is to be
presumed, also, that the being who necessarily exists, is necessarily
good.




IDOL--IDOLATER--IDOLATRY.


SECTION I.

Idol is derived from the Greek word "_eidos_," figure; "_eidolos_," the
representation of a figure, and "_latreuein_," to serve, revere, or
adore.

It does not appear that there was ever any people on earth who took the
name of idolaters. This word is an offence, an insulting term, like that
of "_gavache_," which the Spaniards formerly gave to the French; and
that of "_maranes_," which the French gave to the Spaniards in return.
If we had demanded of the senate of the Areopagus of Athens, or at the
court of the kings of Persia: "Are you idolaters?" they would scarcely
have understood the question. None would have answered: "We adore images
and idols." This word, idolater, idolatry, is found neither in Homer,
Hesiod, Herodotus, nor any other author of the religion of the Gentiles.
There was never any edict, any law, which commanded that idols should be
adored; that they should be treated as gods and regarded as gods.

When the Roman and Carthaginian captains made a treaty, they called all
their gods to witness. "It is in their presence," said they, "that we
swear peace." Yet the statues of these gods, whose number was very
great, were not in the tents of the generals. They regarded, or
pretended to regard, the gods as present at the actions of men as
witnesses and judges. And assuredly it was not the image which
constituted the divinity.

In what view, therefore, did they see the statues of their false gods in
the temples? With the same view, if we may so express ourselves, that
the Catholics see the images, the object of _their_ veneration. The
error was not in adoring a piece of wood or marble, but in adoring a
false divinity, represented by this wood and marble. The difference
between them and the Catholics is, not that they had images, and the
Catholics had none; the difference is, that their images represented the
fantastic beings of a false religion, and that the Christian images
represent real beings in a true religion. The Greeks had the statue of
Hercules, and we have that of St. Christopher; they had Æsculapius and
his goat, we have St. Roch and his dog; they had Mars and his lance, and
we have St. Anthony of Padua and St. James of Compostella.

When the consul Pliny addresses prayers to the immortal gods in the
exordium of the panegyric of Trajan, it is not to images that he
addresses them. These images were not immortal.

Neither the latest nor the most remote times of paganism offer a single
fact which can lead to the conclusion that they adored idols. Homer
speaks only of the gods who inhabited the high Olympus. The palladium,
although fallen from heaven, was only a sacred token of the protection
of Pallas; it was herself that was venerated in the palladium. It was
our ampoule, or holy oil.

But the Romans and Greeks knelt before their statues, gave them crowns,
incense, and flowers, and carried them in triumph in the public places.
The Catholics have sanctified these customs, and yet are not called
idolaters.

The women in times of drouth carried the statues of the Gods after
having fasted. They walked barefooted with dishevelled hair, and it
quickly rained bucketfuls, says Pretonius: "_Et statim urceatim
pluebat_." Has not this custom been consecrated; illegitimate indeed
among the Gentiles, but legitimate among the Catholics? In how many
towns are not images carried to obtain the blessings of heaven through
their intercession? If a Turk, or a learned Chinese, were a witness of
these ceremonies, he would, through ignorance, accuse the Italians of
putting their trust in the figures which they thus promenade in
possession.


SECTION II.

_Examination of the Ancient Idolatry._

From the time of Charles I., the Catholic religion was declared
idolatrous in England. All the Presbyterians are persuaded that the
Catholics adore bread, which they eat, and figures, which are the work
of their sculptors and painters. With that which one part of Europe
reproaches the Catholics, they themselves reproach the Gentiles.

We are surprised at the prodigious number of declamations uttered in all
times against the idolatry of the Romans and Greeks; and we are
afterwards still more surprised when we see that they were not
idolaters.

They had some temples more privileged than others. The great Diana of
Ephesus had more reputation than a village Diana. There were more
miracles performed in the temple of Æsculapius at Epidaurus, than in any
other of his temples. The statue of the Olympian Jupiter attracted more
offerings than that of the Paphlagonian Jupiter. But to oppose the
customs of a true religion to those of a false one, have we not for
several ages had more devotion to certain altars than to others?

Has not Our Lady of Loretto been preferred to Our Lady of Neiges, to
that of Ardens, of Hall, etc.? That is not saying there is more virtue
in a statue at Loretto than in a statue of the village of Hall, but we
have felt more devotion to the one than to the other; we have believed
that she whom we invoked, at the feet of her statues, would condescend,
from the height of heaven, to diffuse more favors and to work more
miracles in Loretto than in Hall. This multiplicity of images of the
same person also proves that it is the images that we revere, and that
the worship relates to the person who is represented; for it is not
possible that every image can be the same thing. There are a thousand
images of St. Francis, which have no resemblance to him, and which do
not resemble one another; and all indicate a single Saint Francis,
invoked, on the day of his feast, by those who are devoted to this
saint.

It was precisely the same with the pagans, who supposed the existence
only of a single divinity, a single Apollo, and not as many Apollos and
Dianas as they had temples and statues. It is therefore proved, as much
as history can prove anything, that the ancients believed not the statue
to be a divinity; that worship was not paid to this statue or image, and
consequently that they were not idolaters. It is for us to ascertain how
far the imputation has been a mere pretext to accuse them of idolatry.

A gross and superstitious populace who reason not, and who know neither
how to doubt, deny, or believe; who visit the temples out of idleness,
and because the lowly are there equal to the great; who make their
contributions because it is the custom; who speak continually of
miracles without examining any of them; and who are very little in point
of intellect beyond the brutes whom they sacrifice--such a people, I
repeat, in the sight of the great Diana, or of Jupiter the Thunderer,
may well be seized with a religious horror, and adore, without
consciousness, the statue itself. This is what happens now and then, in
our own churches, to our ignorant peasantry, who, however, are informed
that it is the blessed mortals received into heaven whose intercession
they solicit, and not that of images of wood and stone.

The Greeks and Romans augment the number of their gods by their
apotheoses. The Greeks deified conquerors like Bacchus, Hercules, and
Perseus. Rome devoted altars to her emperors. Our apotheoses are of a
different kind; we have infinitely more saints than they have secondary
gods, but we pay respect neither to rank nor to conquest. We consecrate
temples to the simply virtuous, who would have been unknown on earth if
they had not been placed in heaven. The apotheoses of the ancients were
the effect of flattery, ours are produced by a respect for virtue.

Cicero, in his philosophical works, only allows of a suspicion that the
people may mistake the statues of the gods and confound them with the
gods themselves. His interlocutors attack the established religion, but
none of them think of accusing the Romans of taking marble and brass for
divinities. Lucretius accuses no person of this stupidity, although he
reproaches the superstitious of every class. This opinion, therefore,
has never existed; there never have been idolaters.

Horace causes an image of Priapus to speak, and makes him say: "I was
once the trunk of a fig tree, and a carpenter being doubtful whether he
should make of me a god or a bench, at length determined to make me a
divinity." What are we to gather from this pleasantry? Priapus was one
of the subaltern divinities, and a subject of raillery for the wits, and
this pleasantry is a tolerable proof that a figure placed in the garden
to frighten away the birds could not be very profoundly worshipped.

Dacier, giving way to the spirit of a commentator, observes that Baruch
predicted this adventure. "They became what the workmen chose to make
them:" but might not this be observed of all statues? Had Baruch a
visionary anticipation of the "Satires of Horace"?

A block of marble may as well be hewn into a cistern, as into a figure
of Alexander, Jupiter, or any being still more respectable. The matter
which composed the cherubim of the Holy of Holies might have been
equally appropriated to the vilest functions. Is a throne or altar the
less revered because it might have been formed into a kitchen table?

Dacier, instead of concluding that the Romans adored the statue of
Priapus, and that Baruch predicted it, should have perceived that the
Romans laughed at it. Consult all the authors who speak of the statues
of the gods, you will not find one of them allude to idolatry; their
testimony amounts to the express contrary. "It is not the workman," says
Martial, "who makes the gods, but he who prays to them."

     _Qui finxit sacros auro vel marmore vultus_
     _Non facit ille deos, qui rogat ille facit._

"It is Jove whom we adore in the image of Jove," writes Ovid: "_Colitur
pro Jove, forma Jovis_."

"The gods inhabit our minds and bosoms," observes Statius, "and not
images in the form of them:"

     _Nulla autem effigies, nulli commissa metallo._
     _Forma Dei, mentes habitare et pectora gaudet._

Lucan, too, calls the universe the abode and empire of God: "_Estne Dei,
sedes, nisi terra, et pontus, et aer?_" A volume might be filled with
passages asserting idols to be images alone.

There remains but the case in which statues became oracles; notions that
might have led to an opinion that there was something divine about them.
The predominant sentiment, however, was that the gods had chosen to
visit certain altars and images, in order to give audience to mortals,
and to reply to them. We read in Homer and in the chorus of the Greek
tragedies, of prayers to Apollo, who delivered his responses on the
mountains in such a temple, or such a town. There is not, in all
antiquity, the least trace of a prayer addressed to a statue; and if it
was believed that the divine spirit preferred certain temples and
images, as he preferred certain men, it was simply an error in
application. How many miraculous images have we? The ancients only
boasted of possessing what we possess, and if we are not idolaters for
using images, by what correct principle can we term them so?

Those who profess magic, and who either believe, or affect to believe
it, a science, pretend to possess the secret of making the gods descend
into their statues, not indeed, the superior gods, but the secondary
gods or genii. This is what Hermes Trismegistus calls "making" gods--a
doctrine which is controverted by St. Augustine in his "City of God."
But even this clearly shows that the images were not thought to possess
anything divine, since it required a magician to animate them, and it
happened very rarely that a magician was successful in these sublime
endeavors.

In a word, the images of the gods were not gods. Jupiter, and not his
statue, launched his thunderbolts; it was not the statue of Neptune
which stirred up tempests, nor that of Apollo which bestowed light. The
Greeks and the Romans were Gentiles and Polytheists, but not idolaters.

We lavished this reproach upon them when we had neither statues nor
temples, and have continued the injustice even after having employed
painting and sculpture to honor and represent our truths, precisely in
the same manner in which those we reproach employed them to honor and
personify their fiction.


SECTION III.

_Whether the Persians, the Sabæans, the Egyptians, the Tartars, or the
Turks, have been Idolaters, and the Extent of the Antiquity of the
Images Called Idols--History of Their Worship._

It is a great error to denominate those idolaters who worship the sun
and the stars. These nations for a long time had neither images nor
temples. If they were wrong, it was in rendering to the stars that which
belonged only to the creator of the stars. Moreover, the dogma of
Zoroaster, or Zerdusht, teaches a Supreme Being, an avenger and
rewarder, which opinion is very distant from idolatry. The government of
China possesses no idol, but has always preserved the simple worship of
the master of heaven, Kien-tien.

Genghis Khan, among the Tartars, was not an idolater, and used no
images. The Mahometans, who inhabit Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia,
India, and Africa, call the Christians idolaters and giaours, because
they imagine that Christians worship images. They break the statues
which they find in Sancta Sophia, the church of the Holy Apostles; and
others they convert into mosques. Appearances have deceived them, as
they are eternally deceiving man, and have led them to believe that
churches dedicated to saints who were formerly men, images of saints
worshipped kneeling, and miracles worked in these churches, are
invincible proofs of absolute idolatry; although all amount to nothing.
Christians, in fact, adore one God only, and even in the blessed, only
revere the virtues of God manifested in them. The image-breakers
(iconoclasts), and the Protestants, who reproach the Catholic Church
with idolatry, claim the same answer.

As men rarely form precise ideas, and still less express them with
precision, we call the Gentiles, and still more the Polytheists,
idolaters. An immense number of volumes have been written in order to
develop the various opinions upon the origin of the worship rendered to
the deity. This multitude of books and opinions proves nothing, except
ignorance.

It is not known who invented coats, shoes, and stockings, and yet we
would know who invented idols. What signifies a passage of
Sanchoniathon, who lived before the battle of Troy? What does he teach
us when he says that _Chaos_--the spirit, that is to say, the breath--in
love with his principles, draws the veil from it, which renders the air
luminous; that the wind _Colp_, and his wife _Bau_, engendered _Eon_;
that _Eon_ engendered _Genos_, that _Chronos_, their descendant, had two
eyes behind as well as before; that he became a god, and that he gave
Egypt to his son _Thaut_? Such is one of the most respectable monuments
of antiquity.

Orpheus will teach us no more in his "Theogony," than Damasius has
preserved to us. He represents the principles of the world under the
figure of a dragon with two heads, the one of a bull, the other of a
lion; a face in the middle, which he calls the face of God, and golden
wings to his shoulders.

But, from these fantastic ideas may be drawn two great truths--the one
that sensible images and hieroglyphics are of the remotest antiquity;
the other that all the ancient philosophers have recognized a First
Principle.

As to polytheism, good sense will tell you that as long as men have
existed--that is to say, weak animals capable of reason and folly,
subject to all accidents, sickness and death--these men have felt their
weakness and dependence. Obliged to acknowledge that there is something
more powerful than themselves; having discovered a principle in the
earth which furnishes their aliment; one in the air which often destroys
them; one in fire which consumes; and in water which drowns them--what
is more natural than for ignorant men to imagine beings which preside
over these elements? What is more natural than to revere the invisible
power which makes the sun and stars shine to our eyes? and, since they
would form an idea of powers superior to man, what more natural than to
figure them in a sensible manner? Could they think otherwise? The Jewish
religion, which preceded ours, and which was given by God himself, was
filled with these images, under which God is represented. He deigns to
speak the human language in a bush; He appeared once on a mountain; the
celestial spirits which he sends all come with a human form: finally,
the sanctuary is covered with cherubs, which are the bodies of men with
the wings and heads of animals. It is this which has given rise to the
error of Plutarch, Tacitus, Appian, and so many others, of reproaching
the Jews with adoring an ass's head. God, in spite of his prohibition to
paint or form likenesses, has, therefore, deigned to adapt himself to
human weakness, which required the senses to be addressed by sensible
beings.

Isaiah, in chapter vi., sees the Lord seated on a throne, and His train
filled the temple. The Lord extends His hand, and touches the mouth of
Jeremiah, in chap. i. of that prophet. Ezekiel, in chap. i., sees a
throne of sapphire, and God appeared to him like a man seated on this
throne. These images alter not the purity of the Jewish religion, which
never employed pictures, statues, or idols, to represent God to the eyes
of the people.

The learned Chinese, the Parsees, and the ancient Egyptians, had no
idols; but Isis and Osiris were soon represented. Bel, at Babylon, was a
great colossus. Brahma was a fantastic monster in the peninsula of
India. Above all, the Greeks multiplied the names of the gods, statues,
and temples, but always attributed the supreme power to their _Zeus_,
called Jupiter by the Latins, the sovereign of gods and men. The Romans
imitated the Greeks. These people always placed all the gods in heaven,
without knowing what they understood by heaven.

The Romans had their twelve great gods, six male and six female, whom
they called "_Dii majorum gentium_"; Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo, Vulcan,
Mars, Mercury, Juno, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, Venus, and Diana; Pluto was
therefore forgotten: Vesta took his place.

Afterwards, came the gods "_minorum gentium_," the gods of mortal
origin; the heroes, as Bacchus, Hercules, and Æsculapius: the infernal
gods, Pluto and Proserpine: those of the sea, as Tethys, Amphitrite, the
Nereids, and Glaucus. The Dryads, Naiads, gods of gardens; those of
shepherds, etc. They had them, indeed, for every profession, for every
action of life, for children, marriageable girls, married, and lying-in
women: they had even the god Peditum; and finally, they idolized their
emperors. Neither these emperors nor the god Peditum, the goddess
Pertunda, nor Priapus, nor Rumilia, the goddess of nipples; nor
Stercutius, the god of the privy, were, in truth, regarded as the
masters of heaven and earth. The emperors had sometimes temples, the
petty gods--the penates--had none; but all had their representations,
their images.

There were little images with which they ornamented their closets, the
amusements of old women and children, which were not authorized by any
public worship. The superstition of every individual was left to act
according to his own taste. These small idols are still found in the
ruins of ancient towns.

If no person knows when men began to make these images, they must know
that they are of the greatest antiquity. Terah, the father of Abraham,
made them at Ur in Chaldæa. Rachel stole and carried off the images of
Laban, her father. We cannot go back further.

But what precise notion had the ancient nations of all these
representations? What virtue, what power, was attributed to them?
Believed they that the gods descended from heaven to conceal themselves
in these statues; or that they communicated to them a part of the divine
spirit; or that they communicated to them nothing at all? There has been
much very uselessly written on this subject; it is clear that every man
judged of it according to the degree of his reason, credulity, or
fanaticism. It is evident that the priests attached as much divinity to
their statues as they possibly could, to attract more offerings. We know
that the philosophers reproved these superstitions, that warriors
laughed at them, that the magistrates tolerated them, and that the
people, always absurd, knew not what they did. In a word, this is the
history of all nations to which God has not made himself known.

The same idea may be formed of the worship which all Egypt rendered to
the cow, and that several towns paid to a dog, an ape, a cat, and to
onions. It appears that these were first emblems. Afterwards, a certain
ox Apis, and a certain dog Anubis, were adored; they always ate beef and
onions; but it is difficult to know what the old women of Egypt thought
of the holy cows and onions.

Idols also often spoke. On the day of the feast of Cybele at Rome, those
fine words were commemorated which the statue pronounced when it was
translated from the palace of King Attilus: "I wish to depart; take me
away quickly; Rome is worthy the residence of every god."

     _Ipsa peti volui; ne sit mora, mitte volentum;_
     _Dignus Roma locus quo Deus omnis eat._
                           --OVID'S _Fasti_, iv, 269-270.

The statue of Fortune spoke; the Scipios, the Ciceros, and the Cæsars,
indeed, believed nothing of it; but the old woman, to whom Encolpus gave
a crown to buy geese and gods, might credit it.

Idols also gave oracles, and priests hidden in the hollow of the statues
spoke in the name of the divinity.

How happens it, in the midst of so many gods and different théogonies
and particular worships, that there was never any religious war among
the people called idolaters? This peace was a good produced from an
evil, even from error; for each nation, acknowledging several inferior
gods, found it good for his neighbors also to have theirs. If you except
Cambyses, who is reproached with having killed the ox Apis, you will not
see any conqueror in profane history who ill-treated the gods of a
vanquished people. The heathens had no exclusive religion, and the
priests thought only of multiplying the offerings and sacrifices.

The first offerings were fruits. Soon after, animals were required for
the table of the priests; they killed them themselves, and became cruel
butchers; finally, they introduced the horrible custom of sacrificing
human victims, and above all, children and young girls. The Chinese,
Parsees, and Indians, were never guilty of these abominations; but at
Hieropolis, in Egypt, according to Porphyrius, they immolated men.

Strangers were sacrificed at Taurida: happily, the priests of Taurida
had not much practice. The first Greeks, the Cypriots, Phœnicians,
Tyrians, and Carthaginians, possessed this abominable superstition. The
Romans themselves fell into this religious crime; and Plutarch relates,
that they immolated two Greeks and two Gauls to expiate the gallantries
of three vestals. Procopius, contemporary with the king of the Franks,
Theodobert, says that the Franks sacrificed men when they entered Italy
with that prince. The Gauls and Germans commonly made these frightful
sacrifices. We can scarcely read history without conceiving horror at
mankind.

It is true that among the Jews, Jeptha sacrificed his daughter, and Saul
was ready to immolate his son; it is also true that those who were
devoted to the Lord by anathema could not be redeemed, as other beasts
were, but were doomed to perish.

We will now speak of the human victims sacrificed in all religions.

To console mankind for the horrible picture of these pious sacrifices,
it is important to know, that amongst almost all nations called
idolatrous, there have been holy theologies and popular error, secret
worship and public ceremonies; the religion of sages, and that of the
vulgar. To know that one God alone was taught to those initiated into
the mysteries, it is only necessary to look at the hymn attributed to
the ancient Orpheus, which was sung in the mysteries of the Eleusinian
Ceres, so celebrated in Europe and Asia: "Contemplate divine nature;
illuminate thy mind; govern thy heart; walk in the path of justice, that
the God of heaven and earth may be always present to thy eyes: He only
self-exists, all beings derive their existence from Him; He sustains
them all; He has never been seen by mortals, and He sees all things."

We may also read the passage of the philosopher Maximus, whom we have
already quoted: "What man is so gross and stupid as to doubt that there
is a supreme, eternal, and infinite God, who has engendered nothing like
Himself, and who is the common father of all things?"

There are a thousand proofs that the ancient sages not only abhorred
idolatry, but polytheism.

Epictetus, that model of resignation and patience, that man so great in
a humble condition, never speaks of but one God. Read over these maxims:
"God has created me; God is within me; I carry Him everywhere. Can I
defile Him by obscene thoughts, unjust actions, or infamous desires? My
duty is to thank God for all, to praise Him for all; and only to cease
blessing Him in ceasing to live." All the ideas of Epictetus turn on
this principle. Is this an idolater?

Marcus Aurelius, perhaps as great on the throne of the Roman Empire as
Epictetus was in slavery, often speaks, indeed, of the gods, either to
conform himself to the received language, or to express intermediate
beings between the Supreme Being and men; but in how many places does he
show that he recognizes one eternal, infinite God alone? "Our soul,"
says he, "is an emanation from the divinity. My children, my body, my
mind, are derived from God."

The Stoics and Platonics admitted a divine and universal nature; the
Epicureans denied it. The pontiffs spoke only of a single God in their
mysteries. Where then were the idolaters? All our declaimers exclaim
against idolatry like little dogs, that yelp when they hear a great one
bark.

As to the rest, it is one of the greatest errors of the "Dictionary" of
Moréri to say, that in the time of Theodosius the younger, there
remained no idolaters except in the retired countries of Asia and
Africa. Even in the seventh century there were many people still heathen
in Italy. The north of Germany, from the Weser, was not Christian in the
time of Charlemagne. Poland and all the south remained a long time after
him in what was called idolatry; the half of Africa, all the kingdoms
beyond the Ganges, Japan, the populace of China, and a hundred hordes of
Tartars, have preserved their ancient religion. In Europe there are only
a few Laplanders, Samoyedes, and Tartars, who have persevered in the
religion of their ancestors.

Let us conclude with remarking, that in the time which we call the
middle ages, we dominated the country of the Mahometans pagan; we
treated as idolaters and adorers of images, a people who hold all images
in abhorrence. Let us once more avow, that the Turks are more excusable
in believing us idolaters, when they see our altars loaded with images
and statues.

A gentleman belonging to Prince Ragotski assured me upon his honor, that
being in a coffee-house at Constantinople, the mistress ordered that he
should not be served because he was an idolater. He was a Protestant,
and swore to her that he adored neither host nor images. "Ah! if that is
the case," said the woman, "come to me every day, and you shall be
served for nothing."




IGNATIUS LOYOLA.


If you are desirous of obtaining a great name, of becoming the founder
of a sect or establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your
madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age. Have in your
madness reason enough to guide your extravagances; and forget not to be
excessively opinionated and obstinate. It is certainly possible that you
may get hanged; but if you escape hanging, you will have altars erected
to you.

In real truth, was there ever a fitter subject for the Petites-Maisons,
or Bedlam, than Ignatius, or St. Inigo the Biscayan, for that was his
true name? His head became deranged in consequence of his reading the
"Golden Legend"; as Don Quixote's was, afterwards, by reading the
romances of chivalry. Our Biscayan hero, in the first place, dubs
himself a knight of the Holy Virgin, and performs the Watch of Arms in
honor of his lady. The virgin appears to him and accepts his services;
she often repeats her visit, and introduces to him her son. The devil,
who watches his opportunity, and clearly foresees the injury he must in
the course of time suffer from the Jesuits, comes and makes a tremendous
noise in the house, and breaks all the windows; the Biscayan drives him
away with the sign of the cross; and the devil flies through the wall,
leaving in it a large opening, which was shown to the curious fifty
years after the happy event.

His family, seeing the very disordered state of his mind, is desirous of
his being confined and put under a course of regimen and medicine. He
extricates himself from his family as easily as he did from the devil,
and escapes without knowing where to go. He meets with a Moor, and
disputes with him about the immaculate conception. The Moor, who takes
him exactly for what he is, quits him as speedily as possible. The
Biscayan hesitates whether he shall kill the Moor or pray to God for his
conversion; he leaves the decision to his horse, and the animal, rather
wiser than its master, takes the road leading to the stable.

Our hero, after this adventure, undertakes a pilgrimage to Bethlehem,
begging his bread on the way: his madness increases as he proceeds; the
Dominicans take pity on him at Manrosa, and keep him in their
establishment for some days, and then dismiss him uncured.

He embarks at Barcelona, and goes to Venice; he returns to Barcelona,
still travelling as a mendicant, always experiencing trances and
ecstacies, and frequently visited by the Holy Virgin and Jesus Christ.

At length, he was given to understand that, in order to go to the Holy
Land with any fair view of converting the Turks, the Christians of the
Greek church, the Armenians, and the Jews, it was necessary to begin
with a little study of theology. Our hero desires nothing better; but,
to become a theologian, it was requisite to know something of grammar
and a little Latin; this gives him no embarrassment whatever: he goes to
college at the age of thirty-three; he is there laughed at, and learns
nothing.

He was almost broken-hearted at the idea of not being able to go and
convert the infidels. The devil, for this once, took pity on him. He
appeared to him, and swore to him, on the faith of a Christian, that, if
he would deliver himself over to him, he would make him the most learned
and able man in the church of God. Ignatius, however, was not to be
cajoled to place himself under the discipline of such a master; he went
back to his class; he occasionally experienced the rod, but his learning
made no progress.

Expelled from the college of Barcelona, persecuted by the devil, who
punished him for refusing to submit to his instructions, and abandoned
by the Virgin Mary, who took no pains about assisting her devoted
knight, he, nevertheless, does not give way to despair. He joins the
pilgrims of St. James in their wanderings over the country. He preaches
in the streets and public places, from city to city, and is shut up in
the dungeons of the Inquisition. Delivered from the Inquisition, he is
put in prison at Alcala. He escapes thence to Salamanca, and is there
again imprisoned. At length, perceiving that he is no prophet in his own
country, he forms a resolution to go to Paris. He travels thither on
foot, driving before him an ass which carried his baggage, money, and
manuscripts. Don Quixote had a horse and an esquire, but Ignatius was
not provided with either.

He experiences at Paris the same insults and injuries as he had endured
in Spain. He is absolutely flogged, in all the regular form and ceremony
of scholastic discipline, at the college of St. Barbe. His vocation, at
length, calls him to Rome.

How could it possibly come to pass, that a man of such extravagant
character and manners, should at length obtain consideration at the
court of Rome, gain over a number of disciples, and become the founder
of a powerful order, among whom are to be found men of unquestionable
worth and learning? The reason is, that he was opinionated, obstinate,
and enthusiastic; and found enthusiasts like himself, with whom he
associated. These, having rather a greater share of reason than himself,
were instrumental in somewhat restoring and re-establishing his own; he
became more prudent and regular towards the close of his life, and
occasionally even displayed in his conduct proofs of ability.

Perhaps Mahomet, in his first conversations with the angel Gabriel,
began his career with being as much deranged as Ignatius; and perhaps
Ignatius, in Mahomet's circumstances, would have performed as great
achievements as the prophet; for he was equally ignorant, and quite as
visionary and intrepid.

It is a common observation, that such cases occur only once: however, it
is not long since an English rustic, more ignorant than the Spaniard
Ignatius, formed the society of people called "Quakers"; a society far
superior to that of Ignatius. Count Zinzendorf has, in our own time,
formed the sect of Moravians; and the Convulsionaries of Paris were very
nearly upon the point of effecting a revolution. They were quite mad
enough, but they were not sufficiently persevering and obstinate.




IGNORANCE.


SECTION I.

There are many kinds of ignorance; but the worst of all is that of
critics, who, it is well known, are doubly bound to possess information
and judgment as persons who undertake to affirm and to censure. When
they pronounce erroneously, therefore, they are doubly culpable.

A man, for example, composes two large volumes upon a few pages of a
valuable book which he has not understood, and in the first place
examines the following words:

"The sea has covered immense tracts.... The deep beds of shells which
are found in Touraine and elsewhere, could have been deposited there
only by the sea."

True, if those beds of shells exist in fact; but the critic ought to be
aware that the author himself discovered, or thought he had discovered,
that those regular beds of shells have no existence.

He ought to have said:

"The universal Deluge is related by Moses with the agreement of all
nations."

1. Because the Pentateuch was long unknown, not only to the other
nations of the world, but to the Jews themselves.

2. Because only a single copy of the law was found at the bottom of an
old chest in the time of King Josiah.

3. Because that book was lost during the captivity.

4. Because it was restored by Esdras.

5. Because it was always unknown to every other nation till the time of
its being translated by the Seventy.

6. Because, even after the translation ascribed to the Seventy, we have
not a single author among the Gentiles who quotes a single passage from
this book, down to the time of Longinus, who lived under the Emperor
Aurelian.

7. Because no other nation ever admitted a universal deluge before
Ovid's "Metamorphoses"; and even Ovid himself does not make his deluge
extend beyond the Mediterranean.

8. Because St. Augustine expressly acknowledges that the universal
deluge was unknown to all antiquity.

9. Because the first deluge of which any notice is taken by the
Gentiles, is that mentioned by Berosus, and which he fixes at about four
thousand four hundred years before our vulgar era; which deluge did not
extend beyond the Euxine Sea.

10. Finally, because no monument of a universal deluge remains in any
nation in the world.

In addition to all these reasons, it must be observed, that the critic
did not even understand the simple state of the question. The only
inquiry is, whether we have any natural proof that the sea has
successively abandoned many tracts of territory? and upon this plain and
mere matter-of-fact subject, M. Abbé François has taken occasion to
abuse men whom he certainly neither knows nor understands. It is far
better to be silent, than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.

The same critic, in order to prop up old ideas, no

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