Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the tremendous value of carefully pre-arranged publicity. And we cannot blame them. They were not the sort of men who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the road like the blushing daisies. They were very much in earnest. They wanted their ideas to live. How could they hope to succeed without attracting a crowd of followers? A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence by spending eighty years in a quiet corner of a monastery, for such long voluntary exile, if duly advertised (as it was), becomes an excellent selling point and makes people curious to see the little book which was born of a lifetime of prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola, who hope to see some tangible results of their work while they are still on this planet, must willy-nilly resort to methods now usually associated with a circus or a new movie star. Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises those who are humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols these virtues was delivered under circumstances which have made it a subject of conversation to this very day. No wonder that those men and women who were denounced as the arch enemies of the Church took a leaf out of the Holy Book and resorted to certain rather obvious methods of publicity when they began their great fight upon the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in bondage. I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest of all virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has very often been blamed for the way in which he sometimes played upon the tom-tom of public consciousness. Perhaps he did not always show the best of good taste. But those whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it. And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the success or failure of a man like Voltaire should be measured by the services he actually rendered to his fellow-men and not by his predilection for certain sorts of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.