From 1760 to the end of his life Voltaire assumed as his motto the impious expression: _Ecrassez l'infame_, "crush the infamous thing," intending thereby to indicate Christ and His Church. Throughout all these years the term appears constantly in his own and his disciples' letters. How he revels in his insane and satanic hatred, hardly finding words that can fitly convey his utter aversion for the things of God! The Christian religion he proclaims "an abominable hydra, a monster which a hundred hands must destroy." He bids the philosophers scour the streets to destroy it "as missionaries journey over land and sea to propagate it." He bids them dare everything even to being burned in order to destroy Christianity. Again he calls upon his fawning admirers to annihilate Christianity, to hunt it down, to vilify it, to ruin it. The perusal of his works leaves one with the impression that Voltaire was constantly troubled with a nightmare, in the effort to free himself from which he emitted his lugubrious wailings. In 1778 the mob of Paris united to crown him at the Theatre Francais. Referring to these manifestations the impious one wrote: "My entry into Paris was more triumphant than that of Jesus into Jerusalem." The further work of Voltaire was in accordance with expressions like these. His intimacy with Frederic II., of Prussia afforded the blasphemer many opportunities of indulging his satanic impulses. Among the anti-Christian sophists who made the Palace of Berlin their rendezvous was a school of Freemasons who had already begun to celebrate the final downfall of the Papacy. For the more rapid realization of this hope various expedients were advocated, among them being the pet resort of irreligious tyrants,--the abolition of the monastic orders, a project which found its foremost exponent in Voltaire. Such was the man to whom anti-Christianism looks up, as to its great and original patriarch, a man utterly devoid of the human moral sense, a man to whom all that savored of the good or virtuous was an abomination and a thing of infamy, a man whose methods of deceit are expressed in his own words: "Lying is a vice only when it harms. You ought to lie like the devil, not timidly or once only, but boldly, and all the time. Lie, lie! my friends, and some of it will be sure to stick." From his works anti-Christianism took the chief formulas of its creed, and following in the footsteps of its master, it has performed deeds worthy of his approbation.