He teaches no mystery, but the open secret of Secularism—_il faut cultiver nôtre jardin_ (we must cultivate our garden). “Life,” he said, “is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pass rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.” Economy, he declared, is the source of liberality, and this maxim he reduced to practice. He ridiculed all pretences; those of the physician as well as of the metaphysician. “What have you undertaken?” he said, smiling, to a young man, who answered that he was studying medicine. “Why, to convey drugs of which you know little into a body of which you know less!” “Regimen,” said he, “is better than physic. Everyone should be his own physician. Eat with moderation what you know by experience agrees with your constitution. Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. What medicine can procure digestion? Exercise. What recruit strength? Sleep. What alleviate incurable evils? Patience.” The tone of Voltaire is not fervid or heroic, like, for instance, that of Carlyle; but he worked, as Carlyle did not, for a great cause. He felt for suffering outside himself. Without mysticism or fanaticism, aiming at no remote or impracticable ideal, he ever insisted on meeting the problems of life with practical good sense, toleration, and humanity. He sought always for clear ideas, tangible results, and as Mr. Lecky says, “labored steadily within the limits of his ideals and of his sympathies, to make the world wiser, happier, and better place than he found it.” Voltaire wrote: “My motto is, ‘Straight to the fact,’” and this was a characteristic which equally marked him and Frederick. He had a horror of phrases. “Your fine phrases,” said one to him. “My fine phrases! Learn that I never made one in my life.” His style is indeed marked by restraint and simplicity of diction. He wrote to D’Alembert: “You will never succeed in delivering men from error by means of metaphysics. You must prove the truth by facts.” As an instance of his apt mingling of fact with reason and ridicule, take his treatment of the doctrine of the Resurrection in the _Philosophical Dictionary_. “A Breton soldier goes to Canada. He finds by chance he falls short of food. He is forced to eat an Iroquois he has killed over-night. This Iroquois had nourished himself on Jesuits during two or three months, a great part of his body has become Jesuit. So there is the body of this soldier composed of Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he had eaten before. How will each resume precisely what belonged to him?” Magnify his failings as you may, you cannot obliterate his one transcendent merit, his humanity ever responsive to every claim of suffering or wrong. He stood for the rights of conscience, for the dignity of human reason, for the gospel of Freethought.