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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.

And this brings me to the last point that I desire to touch before I introduce, one by one, the works contained in this volume. Why reproduce at all, in the twentieth century, these fitting scourges of the superstitions of the eighteenth? I have said that they deserve to be reproduced for their historical interest and for the great part they have played in the history of Europe; but there is another reason. I have an idea that, if Voltaire were alive in England to-day, he would write with more scathing irony than ever. I imagine him gazing with profound admiration at that marvellous picture of the past which science and archæology have given us, and then asking at what date in the nineteenth century we ceased to dispute about consubstantiality and transubstantiation, took the gilt off our Old Testament, and elevated our bishops to the rank of citizens. I then fancy him peeping into the fine schools of London or Manchester, and learning that the first educational authorities in England still set children to learn about Adam and Eve, the Deluge, the Plagues of Egypt, and the remarkable proceedings of Joshua and David and the rest. I try to conceive him studying the faces of learned judges and professors, as they listen gravely to the reading of the Bible and the creeds in church on Sundays, or reverently handle the book in court. I picture his amazement as he learns that this England, which he thought so enlightened, still, at the dictation of its bishops, retains the most abominable divorce law in the civilised world; or hears preachers and social students seriously expressing concern for the future of Europe on account of the decay of docility to the clergy. What would he have written on such a situation?