a much more serious ground of offense that he intermeddled in religion without being himself, in any measure, religious; that he entered the temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding beyond the mere superficies of what Christianity was." In fact, in the organization of Voltaire, the organ of reverence, "the crown of the whole moral nature," seems to have been at its minimum. A sense of justice there was; an ardent sympathy with the oppressed, a generous hatred of the oppressor, a ready devotion of time, thought, wealth, to the relief of the down-trodden victim. Therefore, with such qualities, Voltaire, by the additional help of his indefatigable energy, often succeeded in plucking the prey from the jaws of the lion. He was able to defeat the combined powers of Church and State in his advocacy of some individual sufferer, in his battle against some single wrong. But his long war against the Catholic Church in France left it just where it was when that war began. Its power to-day in France is greater than it was then, because it is a purer and better institution than it was then. That Sphinx still sits by the roadside propounding its riddle. Voltaire was not the Œdipus who could solve it, and so the life of that mystery remains untouched until now. The Henriade has often been considered the great epic poem of France. This merely means that France has never produced a great epic poem. The Henriade is artificial, prosaic, and has no particle of the glow, the fire, the prolonged enthusiasm, which alone can give an epic poem to mankind. In this sentence all competent critics are agreed.