We know of no school of philosophy which has been so entirely mistaken, and so little comprehended, as that which, with Voltaire at their head, was charged by the pious humbug and flunkey loyalty of the last century, with having laid the seeds of the great revolution of France. Because treason, rebellion, anarchy and ruin followed in the train of their opinions it has been assumed that they were mere demagogues, Republicans, and hatchers of sedition. Because the Goddess of reason was raised to her throne almost as a corollary from their works, it is taken for granted that they were the expounders of the doctrine of the Everlasting No. They are called Cynics—scoffers. In the paintings of orthodox and lick-spittle artists Voltaire is introduced among the crowd gazing on Christ with sardonic grin on an envious visage. They were execrated from every pulpit as Atheists and levellers. They were made the old bogies of every tea table. Every religious meeting rang with warnings against their works and anathemas of themselves. Their death bed scenes were entirely mythologised. Hume, it was solemnly alleged, died howling in despair of his soul. Voltaire, it was confidently asserted, beseeched his attendants to "torment him no more with the mention of that Man Christ." A tissue of the most startling but extravagant lies was disseminated in tracts and paragraphs in regard to their lives, characters, and ends. Nothing was too atrocious for them to do—nothing too absurd and incredible for them to say. Pious people bated their breath at the utterance of their very names, as if they whispered the spirit of the " Prince of the Power of the Air." The cant and fudge about them were endless. They were sceptics, infidels, Atheists, and therefore enemies to order, law, authority, society. Every man who hinted at independence of opinion in matters of religion was branded with suspicion of treason. Dissenters, especially Quakers and Unitarians, were marked men, as certain to be disaffected to the State, and to desire for England the great convulsions of France. In short, the great lights of Europe, the most illustrious philosophers, poets, historians of their age and country, were identified by the orthodox Churchmen and subservient politicians of their time with the mere Jacquerie, the sans culottes, the demagogue rabble, the Ishmaelites of society, who sought to turn the world upside down merely because they happened to be themselves at the bottom of it. Yes — the foolometry of England, led by its incarnate stupidity, George III., and encouraged by the hypocrisy of evangelical piety, was too many for its wise men, its scholars, poets, historians, men of science. The art and cunning which identified free thought and mental and moral intrepidity with revolution, contrived to raise the fools, blockheads, and sanctified knaves of the world far above its greatest thinkers and its noblest actors. Jacobite, leveller, sceptic— it was quite enough to pronounce these cabalistic words, and straightway the very salt of the earth lost its savour. The monarch who thought Brentford the finest town in England because it was so like Hanover—who pronounced Shakspeare to be " poor stuff." and Percival the very greatest of men—beat all the genius and intellect of Europe by tract societies, and by alarming property for its breeches pockets. The Thirty-nine articles were infallible because dissent from them was the forerunner of anarchy, and repudiation of the National Debt.
By their ceaseless endeavours to trace a sequence from the labours of Voltaire and his fellow Academicians to the spirit of the French Revolution, cant and hypocrisy succeeded in entirely perverting their true character in the eyes of the people. George III. and his "King's friends," who were the greatest traitors to the Constitution, and were elaborately subverting the fundamental principles of our Government, under cover of the cry of the Church in danger and down with the Jacobites, nearly succeeded in establishing an absolute monarchy by raising a panic against the masses of the people, as being tainted with revolutionary ideas. Dunning's celebrated resolution— that the power of the Crown had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished, found no favor in a venal House of Commons, and a subservient oligarchy. The dread of French philosophy became the profitable stock-in-trade of ambitious adventurers in Church and State. By ringing the changes on this theme Pitt and Burke conquered the manly wisdom and patriotic independence of Fox; and a Sovereign removed from lunacy by the briefest lucid intervals, continued with that cry to arrest the progress of liberty, and establish the ascendency of the Crown on the ruins of the " Rights of Man," and the " Age of Reason.''
Yet no men were so removed from democracy as the Academicians. They regarded the masses with all the pity for their condition that contempt for their ignorance and prejudice had left. They were men, who, least of all, regarded the benighted mob as fit for self-government. Their Utopia never contemplated a republican equality in administration and legislation. They never believed that the people could be a law unto themselves. Their mission, nobly undertaken and fulfilled with consummate skill and genius, was to expose the abuses of the privileged classes, to lay bare the impious infidelity of the Church, to explode those political maxims whereby the elements of liberty were undermined, and the people of Europe were rapidly being driven into an entire surrender of their rights and an abandonment of their ancient freedom. The sole ground of the charge of demagogy and Republicanism raised against them was that they opened the eyes of the people to the deep iniquity of their oppressors. The colour given to the charge of Atheism was that they undeceived the dupes and victims of priestcraft ; that they disenthralled the general mind from the slavery of a grovelling superstition. Until their time superstition, hypocrisy, Popery, sacredotalism, priestcraft, kingcraft, had arrested the progress of intelligence, and crushed the spirit of free enquiry. The established clergy had for centuries been piling up hills of fantastic lies on the subject of theology, and surrounding faith with those incredible factions which—
Of sweet religion made
A rhapsody of words.
They had so entirely suppressed all investigation into the grounds of faith, that it became absolutely a fashion to profess infidelity. A large portion of the clergy, especially in France, were entirely " without God and without hope in the world." In England the penalties which surrounded Dissent, or the most candid, even earnest investigation of theological dogmas, induced the conviction, even among the most polished classes, that the whole thing was a "cunningly devised fable." Priestly mentions that on attending the Court of France the Archbishop of Paris pointed out to him the Archbishop of Reims with the observation, " D'ye see that formal prig? He actually pretends to be pious. But the fact it, he is as thorough a sceptic as you and I are !"
Was it not time, if liberty and sincere religion were to exist at all, that this state of things should be put a stop to? If men were not to be the mere slaves of imbecile kings, and the Gospel perverted into a grovelling and soul-killing mythology, was it not essential that the light should be let in on the frauds and thefts of priests and kings? Was it wonderful, if in weeding this foul field, the wheat should sometimes be torn up with the tares? Was it not to be anticipated that, sometimes in honest detestation of clumsy spiritual imposture, logic should " come from the pate as birdlime does from frieze—pluck out brains and all"? A desperate remedy was needed. Mere rosewater dilettantism would not sweeten this foul moral puddle. The men who had the mission of taking the hoodwinks from the world were too indignant at the cheats that had been practised upon it to hold any terms with the entire in whose behalf they were passed off upon mankind. A lusty infidelity, a healthy scepticism, was the first essential step towards emancipating the fundamental elements of the religious sentiment from the superincumbent mass of silly fictions that made its very profession ridiculous. " There are circumstances," observed Channing, "in which total unbelief may be a virtue. Sooner would I believe with the Greek and Roman that Deity came down from Heaven to fall in love with the beautiful objects of His own creation, than that he had consigned all mankind to eternal perdition for no reason but that He had created them in a whim of his caprice." It was necessary to make society sceptical to strike from it the spiritual fetters of a grovelling superstition—to liberate science from the thraldom in which tradition and spiritual tyranny had chained it—to vindicate the prerogatives of citizenhood from the usurpations of thrones and oligarchs. The remedy was sharp—the redress terrible: but to the Academicians Europe owns much of what liberty, especially intellectual liberty it possesses, and England not a small portion of its national independence. Nor can we envy the feelings or the mind of any man who can rise from the study of the noble reason, the generous enthusiasm, the acute intelligence, aye, the honest criticism and sturdy humanity of Voltaire, without thanking Heaven for the gift of such a man at such a time.
The reaction against the French Revolution threatened to overwhelm the liberties of England. King and bishop laboured to leave citizenship nothing it could call its own. Thought and speech were under the most cruel censorship. The Court could do anything it pleased, and it pleased to do all it could to make a Prussia of Britain. Spies, secret informers were everywhere. Men were employed by the Home Office to entrap the ignorant into statutable offences. Our criminal code was that of Draco. A crazy king had just the craft to use religion as an instrument for consolidating absolute power. Was it wonderful that PUBLICOLA should preach Republicanism— that he should open the eyes of the people to spiritual imposture — that he should be so driven to explode the frauds of priesthood, that he should not be not sufficiently careful to separate religion from the cheat of which it was made the instrument? He has done his work—a noble work. The foe is conquered—let the armour rust. Monarchy, from being the strongest, is now the feeblest element in the Constitution. The hierarchy, once insolent, ascendent, tyrannous, and grasping, cannot even save Church-rates. Speech, pen, action are now freer in England than in the United States. The dangerous encroachments of subservient judges, and lickspittle judge-made law, have all been beat back. Judges themselves are daily brought to the bar of public opinion. Public opinion —that is—the popular will to the extent of its intelligence—is paramount, omnipotent. The rising generation cannot even conceive of the enormities with which their fathers had to struggle, and with which PUBLICOLA had weekly to do battle. To them the thought and language, which were the necessary mental and moral daily food of their fathers, would now be the spiced condiments of the cruet-stand. Republicanism, which was then the only apparent escape from an absolute tyranny, is now an extravagance and an excess. Scepticism, the only antidote to imposture and superstition has given place to an earnest, sincere, critical search after truth, and to a deep conviction of the infinite significancy of pure, undefiled, and rational religion. The "Age of Reason" has come, the " Rights of Man" have been achieved, and have been found to mean neither Atheism nor anarchy, but enlightened piety, and constitutional liberty, regulated by an intelligent patriotism and discreet public opinion. Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in ilis. The age is past in which it was believed that men can do without Government, or live without God and without hope in the world. Nay, as the Puritans were also the friends of freedom, so now, perhaps, the most zealous Christians are also the most Radical Reformers, the fastest friends of intelligent democracy. As the threepenny gallery at the Victoria would now pelt from the stage the comedies to which our grandmothers crowded nightly, so the political disquisition, which was, perhaps demanded by the perils of the people in the reign of George III., would meet with no favour in that of Queen Victoria. We have daily and weekly papers, addressed to all tastes and classes. Not one of them can find a circle that indicates the slightest taste for the strong-handed, vigorous, and eloquent democracy and scepticism which the necessities of a former generation almost required, to emancipate it from political prostration, and spiritual tyranny. It simply will no longer pay. Readers and writers have equally outlived, have lived down the evil, and the remedy. An Englishman can realise the noblest aspirations of civil liberty without calling to his aid the red blaze of the demagogue, and venture to sound the very lowest deeps of the Everlasting No, without losing his footing on the rock of rational religion. We know of nothing that so distinctly marks the progress of thought and opinion, the change of manners and of morals, as this—that democracy is no longer disaffection—that discriminating scepticism does not mean infidelity—that the motives of nonconformity, of doubt, and controversy, are dictated by a love of truth, and by earnestness of conviction—and that the principles of political liberty and the elements of spiritual independence too seriously involve the dearest interest of society to be made instruments of party and the tools of the passionate rhetoric of faction, or to be discussed on any other foundation than their own all-significant merits.
Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer 1859,http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article59869937
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