VII.

There is an incalculable power of conviction and devotion of idea, in the daring of one against all.  To brave at once, with no other power than individual reason, with no other support than conscience, human consideration, that cowardice of the mind, masked under respect for error; to dare the hatred of earth and the anathema of heaven, is the heroism of the writer.  Voltaire was not a martyr in his body, but he consented to be one in his name, and devoted it during his life and after his death.  He condemned his own ashes to be thrown to the winds, and not to have either an asylum or a tomb.  He resigned himself even to lengthened exile in exchange for the liberty of a free combat.  He isolated himself voluntarily from men, in order that their too close contact might not interfere with his thoughts.

At eighty years of age, feeble, and feeling his death nearly approaching, he several times made his preparations hastily, in order to go and struggle still, and die at a distance from the roof of his old age.  The unwearied activity of his mind was never checked for a moment.  He carried his gaiety even to genius, and under that pleasantry of his whole life we may perceive a grave power of perseverance and conviction.  Such was the character of this great man.  The enlightened serenity of his mind concealed the depth of its workings:  under the joke and laugh his constancy of purpose was hardly sufficiently recognised.  He suffered all with a laugh, and was willing to endure all, even in absence from his native land, in his lost friendships, in his refused fame, in his blighted name, in his memory accursed.  He took all—­bore all—­for the sake of the triumph of the independence of human reason.  Devotion does not change its worth in changing its cause, and this was his virtue in the eyes of posterity.  He was not the truth, but he was its precursor, and walked in advance of it.

One thing was wanting to him—­the love of a God.  He saw him in mind, and he detested those phantoms which ages of darkness had taken for him, and adored in his stead.  He rent away with rage those clouds which prevent the divine idea from beaming purely on mankind; but his weakness was rather hatred against error, than faith in the Divinity.  The sentiment of religion, that sublime resume of human thought; that reason, which, enlightened by enthusiasm, mounts to God as a flame, and unites itself with him in the unity of the creation with the Creator, of the ray with the focus—­this, Voltaire never felt in his soul.  Thence sprung the results of his philosophy; it created neither morals, nor worship, nor charity; it only decomposed—­destroyed.  Negative, cold, corrosive, sneering, it operated like poison—­it froze—­it killed—­it never gave life.  Thus, it never produced—­even against the errors it assailed, which were but the human alloy of a divine idea—­the whole effect it should have elicited.  It made sceptics, instead