The Essays of "George Eliot": CompleteEliot, George
History
The Essays of "George Eliot": Complete
Eliot, George
Literature -- History and criticism
In his treatment of infidels, we imagine he is guided by a mental process
which may be expressed in the following syllogism: Whatever tends to the
glory of God is true; it is for the glory of God that infidels should be
as bad as possible; therefore, whatever tends to show that infidels are
as bad as possible is true. All infidels, he tells us, have been men of
“gross and licentious lives.” Is there not some well-known unbeliever,
David Hume, for example, of whom even Dr. Cumming’s readers may have
heard as an exception? No matter. Some one suspected that he was _not_
an exception, and as that suspicion tends to the glory of God, it is one
for a Christian to entertain. (See “Man. of Ev.,” p. 73.)—If we were
unable to imagine this kind of self-sophistication, we should be obliged
to suppose that, relying on the ignorance of his evangelical disciples,
he fed them with direct and conscious falsehoods. “Voltaire,” he informs
them, “declares there is no God;” he was “an antitheist, that is one who
deliberately and avowedly opposed and hated God; who swore in his
blasphemy that he would dethrone him;” and “advocated the very depths of
the lowest sensuality.” With regard to many statements of a similar
kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Cumming’s volumes, we
presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by the second-hand
character of his acquaintance with free-thinking literature. An
evangelical preacher is not obliged to be well-read. Here, however, is a
case which the extremest supposition of educated ignorance will not
reach. Even books of “evidences” quote from Voltaire the line—
“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer;”
even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of literature must know
that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist—must know that he
wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he
believed to be a false God—must know that to say Voltaire was an atheist
on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed hereditary
monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title to the
throne. That Dr. Cumming should repeat the vulgar fables about
Voltaire’s death is merely what we might expect from the specimens we
have seen of his illustrative stories. A man whose accounts of his own
experience are apocryphal is not likely to put borrowed narratives to any
severe test.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account