His account of the history of the church is composed in the same vein, and we may see where Gibbon, who was a reader of Voltaire, drew the inspiration of the solemn sneer with which he sapped solemn creed.[257] ‘So many frauds, so many errors, so many disgusting absurdities,’ says Voltaire, ‘with which we have been inundated for seventeen hundred years, have been unable to do any harm to our religion. It is unquestionably divine, since seventeen centuries of imposture and imbecility have not destroyed it.’[258] Voltaire thought as ill as possible of the century to which he belonged; we cannot therefore charge him with the inconsistency which marks some of his most prominent disciples, who while they accepted such an account of the vileness of the church as he had given them, did not scruple to believe that, as if by miracle, seventeen centuries of steady depravation were _per saltum_ to be followed by an eighteenth and other centuries of boundless virtue and enlightenment. Still it is wonderful that he should have been able to appreciate the admirable character of the best sovereign of the thirteenth century, Lewis IX.,[259] and to describe his motives and his achievements so generously, and yet should never have thought of the education and surrounding spiritual conditions by which such a character had been formed. If the power of Catholicism for evil was so great and decisive, it would have been reasonable to suppose that it had some share also in moulding to good those who came forth from it the very flower of humanity. But Voltaire did not know how much a man is the product of a system operating on, and with, the individual predisposition, or he would not have chidden St. Lewis for remaining on the level of the prejudice of his time, instead of changing the spirit of his age.[260] How should St. Lewis have risen from the prejudice of his age, when it was exactly that prejudice which had formed him, and of which he represented the worthy side? Even without this inconsistency, the fundamental error is bad enough. We get very wearied of the persistent identification of the church throughout the dark ages with fraud and imposture and sinister self-seeking, when we have once learnt, what is undoubtedly the most important principle in the study of those times, that it was the churchmen who kept the flickering light of civilisation alive, amid the raging storms of uncontrolled passion and violence. The truth is that Voltaire never realised civilisation as an organism, which if not surrounded with the proper conditions of life will perish, and which will prosper and wax stronger exactly in proportion as it is nourished. That the light was more than once very near sinking in the west under the waves of barbarism, as it has actually sunk in the eastern portions of the Empire, seems to have been an all-important fact which he either never saw, or which, if he saw it, never impressed him as assuredly it ought to have done.