_Answer._ You must remember that the French Revolution was produced by Catholicism; that it was a reaction; that it went to infinite extremes; that it was a revolution seeking revenge. It is not hard to understand those times, provided you know the history of the Catholic Church. The seeds of the French Revolution were sown by priests and kings. The people had suffered the miseries of slavery for a thousand years, and the French Revolution came because human nature could bear the wrongs no longer. It was something not reasoned; it was felt. Only a few acted from intellectual convictions. The most were stung to madness, and were carried away with the desire to destroy. They wanted to shed blood, to tear down palaces, to cut throats, and in some way avenge the wrongs of all the centuries. Catholicism has never recovered--it never will. The dagger of Voltaire struck the heart; the wound was mortal. Catholicism has staggered from that day to this. It has been losing power every moment. At the death of Voltaire there were twenty millions less Catholics than when he was born. In the French Revolution muscle outran mind; revenge anticipated reason. There was destruction without the genius of construction. They had to use materials that had been rendered worthless by ages of Catholicism. The French Revolution was a failure because the French people were a failure, and the French people were a failure because Catholicism had made them so. The ministers attack Voltaire without reading him. Probably there are not a dozen orthodox ministers in the world who have read the works of Voltaire. I know of no one who has. Only a little while ago, a minister told me he had read Voltaire. I offered him one hundred dollars to repeat a paragraph, or to give the title, even, of one of Voltaire's volumes. Most ministers think he was an atheist. The trouble with the infidels in England a hundred years ago was that they did not go far enough. It may be that they could not have gone further and been allowed to live. Most of them took the ground that there was an infinite, all-wise, beneficent God, creator of the universe, and that this all-wise, beneficent God certainly was too good to be the author of the Bible. They, however, insisted that this good God was the author of nature, and the theologians completely turned the tables by showing that this god of nature was in the pestilence and plague business, manufactured earthquakes, overwhelmed towns and cities, and was, of necessity, the author of all pain and agony. In my judgment, the Deists were all successfully answered. The god of nature is certainly as bad as the God of the Old Testament. It is only when we discard the idea of a deity, the idea of cruelty or goodness in nature, that we are able ever to bear with patience the ills of life. I feel that I am neither a favorite nor a victim. Nature neither loves nor hates me. I do not believe in the existence of any personal god. I regard the universe as