Born in Paris of a mother whose loose morals made her a by-word to all who knew her, he imbibed at her breast that appetite for lawlessness and iniquity which ruled him to the last hour. His mother dying during his infancy, he became the protege of an abbe who had abandoned the duties of his sacred calling for the allurements of the world. In his boyhood he was sent to the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand, where the perversity of his character manifested itself to such an extent that one of his teachers prophesied that he would one day become the coryphee of deism. Thereafter his career was one of unlicensed depravity. More than once he was arrested and cast into prison; he had reason to hate the Bastille, for he himself had experienced the life of a criminal therein. [Illustration: VOLTAIRE.] That writer was not far wrong who asserted that irreligion is but one form of the insanity which is born of immoral living. It is remarkable in the anti-Christian literature of all times, and of none more than our own, that its heroes and heroines are the abandoned roués and harlots who, having defiled the temples of their own bodies, seek to carry the abomination of desolation into the holy places of God. In this matter Voltaire was no exception. His immoral life was lived ostentatiously and boastingly. We will not, however, enter upon a list of the criminal observances of this man, preferring to leave such details to their proper place. It will be sufficient to point out the purpose that underlay all the actions and words of his life. This purpose is best indicated by citations from his letters and other written works. His hatred for the Church and for morality is clearly displayed in the works that he gave forth during the later years of his life. In his _Age of Louis XIV._, a work that has been made an obligatory text book in the educational establishments subject to the University of France, we find passages full of insinuations and falsehoods directed against the Holy See. "The Pope's spiritual authority," he says, "is now destroyed and abhorred in one-half of Christendom; and if in the other half he is regarded as a father, he has children who sometimes properly and successfully resist him." Again he asserts: "To swear fidelity to any other than one's own sovereign is high treason in a layman; in the cloister it is an act of religion." He terms the Pope "the foreign sovereign." His _Pucelle_ is a diabolical attempt to besmirch the pure character of Joan of Arc. It was a work, however, which excited so much disgust in all circles that Voltaire endeavored at first to disclaim it, and it was many years before the whole poem could venture forth with his authorization. The high society that could welcome its foetid pages was already ripe for the horrors of the Revolution.