Edgar Quinet, in his lectures on the Church, says: “I watch for forty years the reign of one man who is himself the spiritual direction, not of his country, but of his age. From the corner of his chamber he governs the realm of mind. Everyday intellects are regulated by his; one word written by his hand traverses Europe. Princes love and kings fear him. Nations repeat the words that fall from his pen. Who exercises this incredible power which has nowhere been seen since the Middle Ages? Is he another Gregory VII? Is he a Pope? No—Voltaire.” And Lamartine, in similar strain, remarks: “If we judge of men by what they have _done_, then Voltaire is incontestibly the greatest writer of modern Europe. No one has caused, through the powerful influence of his genius alone and the perseverance of his will, so great a commotion in the minds of men. His pen aroused a sleeping world, and shook a far mightier empire than that of Charlemagne, the European empire of a theocracy. His genius was not _force_, but _light_. Heaven had destined him not to destroy, but to illuminate; and wherever he trod, light followed him, for Reason—which is light—had destined him to be, first her poet, then her apostle, and lastly her idol.” Mr. Alexander A. Knox, writing in the _Nineteenth Century_ (October 1882), says: “That the man’s aspirations were in the main noble and honorable to humanity, I am sure. I am equally so that few men have exercised so great an influence upon their fellow creatures.... The wonderful old man! When he was past eighty years of age he set to work, like another Jeremy Bentham, to abolish the admission of hearsay evidence into French legal proceedings. But his great work was that by his wit and irony he broke down the _principle of authority_ which had been so foully abused in France. Would the most strictly religious man wish to see religion as it was in France in the eighteenth century? Would the greatest stickler for authority wish to find a country governed as France was governed in the days of Voltaire?” Du Bois-Reymond, the eminent German scientist, remarks: “Voltaire is so little to us at present because the things he fought for, ‘toleration, spiritual freedom, human dignity, justice,’ have become, as it were, the air we breathe, and do not think of except when we are deprived of it.”