The selection opens with the _Treatise on Toleration_, which has a mainly historical interest, and illustrates the finest side of Voltaire’s work and character. It shows him as a profound humanitarian, putting aside, in his seventieth year, his laughter and his comfort to take up the cause of an obscure sufferer, and shaking France, as Zola did in our time, with his denunciation of a judicial crime. The story of the crime is told in the essay itself; but it is not told, or in any way conveyed, that, but for the action of the aged rationalist, not a single effort would have been made to secure redress. His splendid action on that and a few similar occasions has been held by critical students of his career to atone for all his errors. Many Protestants who scoff at “Voltaire the scoffer” may learn with surprise that his noble and impassioned struggle earned for them the right to live in Southern France. The treatise was published in 1763. I have omitted a number of lengthy and learned notes and one or two chapters which are incidental to the argument and of little interest to-day. The three Homilies--those _On Superstition_, _On the Interpretation of the Old Testament_, and _On the Interpretation of the New Testament_--are selected from five which Voltaire wrote in 1767, with the literary pretence that they had been delivered before some liberal congregation at London in 1765. The second of these Homilies is one of the most effective indictments of the Old Testament, considered as an inspired book. Nowhere in rationalistic literature is there an exposure of the essential humanity of the Old Testament so condensed yet so fluent, so original in form, comprehensive in range, and unanswerable in argument. It was published, it is believed, in 1767, though the first edition is marked 1766. Its humour is malicious from the first line, as the “Dr. Tamponet” whose name is put to it was really an orthodox champion of the Sorbonne. It is in this short diatribe that I have chiefly made the modifications of which I have spoken. It was Voltaire’s aim to show that the coarseness of many passages of the Old Testament is quite as inconsistent with inspiration as its colossal inaccuracy and its childlike superstition. An English translation, similarly modified, of the _Questions of Zapata_ was made by an anonymous lady, and published by Hetherington, in 1840. In the present translation some of the paragraphs are omitted, and the numbering is therefore altered.