“You mock at sacred things,” said the Jesuits to Pascal when he exposed their casuistry. Doubtless the priests of Baal said the same when Elijah asked them whether their God was asleep, or peradventure on a journey. The artifice of inculcating a solemn and reverential manner of treating absurdities is the perennial recipe for sanctifying and perpetuating superstition. “Priests of all persuasions,” says Oliver Goldsmith, “are enemies to ridicule, because they know it to be a formidable antagonist to fanaticism, and they preach up gravity to conceal their own shallowness of imposture.” Approach the mysteries of the faith with reverence and you concede half the battle. Christian missionaries do not thus treat the fetishism and sorcery of heathen lands. To overcome it they must expose its absurdities. Ridicule has been a weapon in the hands of all the great liberators, Luther, Erasmus, Rabelais, Bruno, Swift, but none used it more effectively than Voltaire. Buckle well says; “He used ridicule, not as the test of truth, but as the scourge of folly.” And he adds: “His irony, his wit, his pungent and telling sarcasms produce more effect than the gravest arguments could have done; and there can be no doubt he was fully justified in using those great resources with which nature had endowed him, since by their aid he advanced the interests of truth, and relieved men from some of their most inveterate prejudices.” Victor Hugo puts the case in poetic fashion when he declares that Voltaire was irony incarnate for the salvation of mankind. “Ridicule is not argument”! Well, it is a pointed form of polemic, the _argumentum ad absurdum_. “Mustapha,” said Voltaire, “does not believe, but he believes that he believes.” To shame him out of hypocrisy, there is nothing better than laughter; and if a true believer, laughter will best free him from terror of his bogey devil and no less bogey god. Ridicule can hurt no reality. You cannot make fun of the multiplication table. The fun begins when the theologians assert that three times one are one. Shaftesbury, who maintained that ridicule was a test of truth, remarked with justice, “’tis the persecuting spirit that has raised the bantering one.” Ridicule is the natural retort to those who seek not to convert but to convict and punish. Ridicule comes like a stream of sunlight to dissipate the fogs of preconceived prejudice. A laugh, if no argument, is a splendid preparative. Often, in Voltaire, ridicule takes an argumentative form. Thus, alluding to a Monsieur Esprit’s book on the Falsity of Human Virtues, he says: “That great genius, Mons. Esprit, tells us that neither Cato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, nor Epictetus were good men, and a good reason why, good men are only found among Christians. Again, among the Christians, Catholics alone are virtuous, and of the Catholics, the Jesuits, enemies of the Oratorians, must be excepted. Therefore, there is scarce any virtue on earth, except among the enemies of the Jesuits.”