Je ne vante point d’avoir en cet asile Rencontré le parfait bonheur: Il n’est point retiré dans le fond d’un bocage; Il est encore moins chez les rois; Il n’est pas même chez le sage; De cette courte vie il n’est point le partage; Il y faut renoncer; mais on peut quelquefois Embrasser au moins son image. ‘’Tis a fine thing, is tranquillity,’ he wrote; ‘yes, but ennui is of its acquaintance and belongs to the family. To repulse this ugly relation, I have set up a theatre.’[173] Besides the theatre, guests were frequent and multitudinous. He speaks of sometimes having a crowd of fifty persons at table.[174] Besides Les Délices and Lausanne, he purchased from the President de Brosses a life-interest in Tourney, and in the same year(1758) he bought the lordship of Ferney, close by. He was thus a citizen of Geneva, of Berne, and of France, ‘for philosophers ought to have two or three holes underground against the hounds who chase them.’ If the dogs of France should hunt him, he could take shelter in Geneva. If the dogs of Geneva began to bay, he could run into France. By and by this consideration of safety grew less absorbing, and all was abandoned except Ferney; a name that will always remain associated with those vigorous and terrible assaults upon the Infamous, which first definitely opened when Voltaire became the lord of this little domain. CHAPTER V. RELIGION. I In examining the Voltairean attack upon religion we have to remember that it was in the first instance prompted, and throughout its course stimulated and embittered, by antipathy to the external organisation of the religion. It was not merely disbelief in a creed, but exasperation against a church. Two distinct elements lay at the bottom of Voltaire’s enmity to the peculiar form of monotheism which he found supreme around him. One of them was the intellectual element of repugnance to a system of belief that rested on miracles and mysteries irreconcilable with reason, and was so intimately associated with some of the most odious types of character and most atrocious actions in the Old Testament, which undoubtedly contains so many of both. The other was the moral element of anger against the expounders of this system, their intolerance of light and hatred of knowledge, their fierce yet profoundly contemptible struggles with one another, the scandals of their casuistry, their besotted cruelty. Of these two elements, the second was, no doubt, if not the earlier in time, at least the stronger in intensity. It was because he perceived the fruit to be so deadly, that Voltaire laid the axe to the root of the tree. It is easy to say that these poisonous Jesuitries and black Jansenisms were no fruit of the tree, but the produce of a mere graft, which could have been lopped off without touching the sacred trunk. Voltaire thought otherwise, and whether he was right or wrong, it is only just to him to keep constantly