and inscribed upon it Deo erexit Voltaire, "Voltaire has erected this to God."[1] Yet did either his words or actions show anything of a religious spirit? Did they display either that reverence or obedience, that properly attends a true acknowledgment of a Divine Being, infinitely wise, good, and powerful? How can he be said to acknowledge a sovereign as a sovereign, who entirely disregards his laws and commands, and tramples them under foot? How can he be said to acknowledge God, who denies His Word?—and, still more, who rejects the Divine Saviour, "God manifest in the flesh?" "He that honoreth not the Son," said that Saviour, "honoreth not the Father who hath sent Him."
David Hume, too, by no means denied the existence of God. He even declared, at a dinner-table in the city of Paris, when surrounded by professed atheists, that he could not believe that such a being as an atheist existed.[2] As is affirmed by his biographer, "the tone of his thoughts sometimes even rose to en-
- ↑ This inscription was obliterated daring the French Revolution, when the madmen of those days set up the idol of Reason, as an object of worship, in the place of the God of religion. No one had conduced more to this consummation than Voltaire himself, by the irrellgious spirit of his writings. Yet his followers went even beyond him: rushing blindly after their leader, they plunged headlong down the precipice of atheism, where Voltaire himself, indeed, just hung by his hands.
- ↑ Nor was he willing even to be called a deist. "A notorious lady," says his biographer, "meeting Hume one night at an assembly, boldly accosted him thus: 'Mr. Hume, give me leave to introduce myself to you: we deists ought to know each other.' 'Madam,' replied he, 'I am no deist; I do not style myself so, neither do I desire to be known by that appellation.'"—Burton's Life of Hume, vol. 2, p. 141.
