Another fact which shows the shallow nature of Voltaire's way of thinking is his expectation of destroying Christianity by a combined attack upon it of all the wits and philosophers. Mr. Parton tells us that "l'Infâme," which Voltaire expected to crush, "was not religion, nor the Christian religion, nor the Roman Catholic Church. It was," he says, "_religion claiming supernatural authority, and enforcing that claim by pains and penalties_." No doubt it was the spirit of intolerance and persecution which excited his indignation. But the object of that indignation was not the abstraction which Mr. Parton presents to us. It was something far more concrete. There is no doubt that Voltaire confounded Christianity with the churches about him, and these with their abuses; and thus his object was to sweep away all positive religious institutions, and to leave in their place a philosophic deism. Else what meaning in his famous boast that "it required twelve men to found a belief, which it would need only one man to destroy"? What meaning, otherwise, in his astonishment that Locke, "having in one book so profoundly traced the development of the understanding, could so degrade his own understanding in another"?--referring, as Mr. Morley believes, to Locke's "Reasonableness of Christianity." Voltaire saw around him Christianity represented by cruel bigots, ecclesiastics living in indolent luxury, narrow-minded and hard-hearted priests. That was all the Christianity he saw with his sharp perceptive faculty; and he had no power of penetrating into the deeper life of the soul which these corruptions misrepresented. We do not blame him for this; he was made so; but it was a fatal defect in a reformer. The first work of a reformer is to discover the truth and the good latent amid the abuses he wishes to reform, and for the sake of which men endure the evil. A Buddhist proverb says, "The human mind is like a leech: it never lets go with its tail till it has taken hold somewhere else with its head." Distinguish the good in a system from the evil; show how the good can be preserved, though the evil is abandoned, and then you may hope to effect a truly radical reform. Radicalism means going to the roots of anything. Voltaire was incapable of becoming a radical reformer of the Christian Church, because he had in himself no faculty by which he could appreciate the central forces of Christianity. Mr. Morley says that Voltaire "has said no word, nor even shown an indirect appreciation of any word said by another, which stirs and expands that indefinite exaltation known as the love of God," "or of the larger word holiness." "Through the affronts which his reason received from certain pretensions, both in the writers and in some of those whose actions they commemorated, this sublime trait in the Bible, in both portions of it, was unhappily lost to Voltaire. He had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice." And so also speaks Carlyle: "It is