The dilettante believer is indeed not a strong spirit, but the weakest, and the facts of life were by this time far too serious for Voltaire, for that truth to have missed his keen-seeing eye. It is not hard to suppose that impatient weariness of the poor life that was lived around him, had as large a share as resentment of an injustice, in driving him to a land where men did not merely mouth idle words of making reason their oracle, their tripod, their god, but where they had actually systematised the rejection of Christianity, and had thrown themselves with grave faith on the disciplined intelligence and its lessons. Voltaire left a country where freedom of thinking was only an empty watchword, the name for a dissipated fashion. It was considered free-thinking if a man allowed himself to regard the existence of the Five Propositions in Jansenius’s book as a thing indifferent to the happiness of the human race.[23] He found in England that it was a far-spreading reality, moulding not only the theological ideas, but the literature, manners, politics, and philosophy, of a great society. Voltaire left France a poet, he returned to it a sage. Before his flight, though we do not know to what extent he may have read such history as was then accessible, he had been actively productive only in the sphere of the imaginative faculties, and in criticism of the form and regulation proper to be imposed upon them. When he returned, while his poetic power had ripened, he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of scientific reason, and, what was not any less important, he had become alive to the central truth of the social destination of all art and all knowledge. In a word, he was transformed from the penman into the captain and man-at-arms. ‘The example of England,’ says Condorcet, ‘showed him that truth is not made to remain a secret in the hands of a few philosophers, and a limited number of men of the world, instructed, or rather indoctrinated, by the philosophers; smiling with them at the errors of which the people are the victims, but at the same time making themselves the champions of these very errors, when their rank or position gives them a real or chimerical interest in them, and quite ready to permit the proscription, or even persecution, of their teachers, if they venture to say what in secret they themselves actually think. From the moment of his return, Voltaire felt himself called to destroy the prejudices of every kind, of which his country was the slave.’[24]