This, I say, was highly characteristic and significant. It gave terse and pointed expression to Voltaire's way of looking at such things. Church and theology were ignored, and the individual soul was left alone with its God. The Protestant reformers and other freethinkers had stopped far short of this. In place of an infallible Church they had left an infallible Book; if they rejected transubstantiation, they retained as obligatory such doctrines as those of the incarnation and atonement; if they laughed at the miracles of mediæval saints, they would allow no discredit to be thrown upon those of the apostolic age; in short, they left standing a large part, if not the larger part, of the supernatural edifice within which the religious mind of Europe had so long been sheltered. But Voltaire regarded that whole supernatural edifice as so much rubbish which was impeding the free development of the human mind, and ought as quickly as possible to be torn to pieces and cleared away. His emotions as well as his reason were concerned in this conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it then existed in France, was responsible for much atrocious injustice, and in neighbouring lands the Inquisition still existed. Ecclesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of ignorance, whatever tended to hold people in darkness and restrain them from the free and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire hated with all the intensity of which he was capable. He summed it all up in one abstract term and personified it as "The Infamous," and the watchword of that life of tireless vigilance was "Crush the Infamous!" Supernatural theology had been too often pressed into the service of "The Infamous," and for supernatural theology Voltaire could find no place in his scheme of things. He lost no chance of assailing it with mockery and sarcasm made terrible by the earnestness of his purpose, until he came in many quarters to be regarded as the most inveterate antagonist the Church had ever known.