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Écrasez l’infame—“Crush the infamous thing”—the battle-cry which he sent over Europe from the Swiss frontier, was but a fiery expression of his love of men, of liberty, of enlightenment, and of progress. Read the stories of brutality in the guise of religion that are told in these pages—stories which ran into Voltaire’s day—the stories of “religious” processions and relics and superstitions, the story of how this ignorant credulity had been imposed on Europe, and how it was maintained by sceptical priests, and say, if you dare, that the phrase was not a cry of truth, sincerity, and humanity. There was even a profoundly religious impulse in his work. A clerical friend once confided to me that he found a use in Voltaire. It seemed that, when inspiration for the Sunday sermon failed, he fell upon my “atheistic friends,” Voltaire and Rousseau, and the French Revolution they brought about. He was amazed to hear that they believed in God as firmly as, and much more reasonably than, he and his colleagues did. Voltaire’s aim was a sincere effort to rid pure religion of its morbid and abominable overgrowths.