Very good, you say; but why not have set about it more politely? For two plain reasons. First, because the character of his opponents fully justified him in directing his most scathing wit upon them. The Jesuits, whom he chiefly lashed, were in his own time ignominiously expelled by nearly every Catholic Power in Europe, and were suppressed by the Pope. The other clergy were deeply tainted with scepticism in the cities, and befogged with dense ignorance in the provinces. One incident will suffice to justify his disdain. His latest English biographer, S. G. Tallentyre, who is not biassed in his favour, says that it is most probable, if not certain, that while the Catholic authorities were burning his books in Paris, and shuddering at his infidelity, they were secretly tempting him, with the prospect of a cardinal’s hat, to join the clergy. It is certain that they invited him to do religious work, and that, at the height of his anti-clerical work, he received direct from the Pope certain relics to put in a chapel he had built for his poor neighbours. Could a prince of irony restrain himself in such circumstances? The other reason is the character of the dogmas and practices he assailed. Read them in the following pages. It is true that there are passages in Voltaire which none of us would, if we could, write to-day. The taste of the eighteenth century, still fouled by the Middle Ages, is not the taste of the twentieth. Besides some longer passages which have been omitted from the _Treatise on Toleration_, as will be explained, a few lines have been struck out or modified here and there in one or two of the works in this selection. Let me not be misunderstood, however. They are mainly words of the Old Testament, and comments inspired only by those words, that have been omitted. In the eighteenth century one could quote and comment in public on these grossnesses. Indeed, by some singular mental process, which Voltaire alone could characterise, the books containing these crudely sexual passages are still thrust into the hands of children and of confined criminals by the joint authority of Church and State in England; and grave bishops and gentle women say that they are the Word of God.