When he was endeavoring to be admitted to a place in the French Academy, he wrote thus to the Bishop of Mirepoix:[42] "Thanks to Heaven, my religion teaches me to know how to suffer. The God who founded it, as soon as he deigned to become man, was of all men the most persecuted. After such an example, it is almost a crime to complain.... I can say, before God who hears me, that I am a good citizen and a true Catholic.... I have written many pages sanctified by religion." In this Mr. Parton admits that he went too far. When at Colmar, as a measure of self-protection, he resolved to commune at Easter. Mr. Parton says that Voltaire had pensions and rents to the amount of sixty thousand livres annually, of which the king could deprive him by a stroke of the pen. So he determined to prove himself a good Catholic by taking the sacraments. As a necessary preliminary, he confessed to a Capuchin monk. He wrote to D'Argens just before, "If I had a hundred thousand men, I know what I should do; but as I have them not, I shall commune at Easter!" But, writing to Rousseau, he thinks it shameful in Galileo to retract his opinions. Mr. Parton too, who is disposed to excuse some of these hypocrisies in Voltaire, is scandalized because the pastors of Geneva denied the charges of heresy brought against them by Voltaire; saying that "we live, as they lived, in an atmosphere of insincerity." In the midst of all this, Voltaire took credit to himself for his frank avowals of the truth: "I am not wrong to dare to utter what worthy men think. For forty years I have braved the base empire of the despots of the mind." Mr. Parton elsewhere seems to think it would have been impossible for Voltaire to versify the Psalms; as it was "asked him to give the lie publicly to his whole career." But if communing at Easter did not do this, how could a versification of a few psalms accomplish it? Parton quotes Condorcet as saying that Voltaire could not become a hypocrite, even to be a cardinal. Could any one do a more hypocritical action than to partake the sacraments of a Church which he despised in order to escape the danger of persecution?