Christianity; but we must recollect that it was Roman Catholic Christianity; and we well know what that is termed by our purer Protestant evangelical errand-boys of God. We have been told that Catholicism is idolatry; but when that idolatry is attacked, common cause is made with it by the professors of supernatural magic, let them be of whatever sect they may. Thus, when the French revolution drove away the priests, the impostors of a religion which for three hundred years we had been told was damnable and idolatrous-what an outcry was made against the impious atheists, infidels, Jacobins, and rebels. But the most curious of all was the fact, that Goddie Mity was so often on the side of these atheists! Had he been bribed, or had his thunder slept? So much for a protecting Providence. No matter! there must be a religion, a superstition, a mysterious power, to awe the wicked and confound the guilty; says one sapient caviller of Voltaire :-"when the Romans became wise enough to despise the oracles of their forefathers, and the sugars almost laughed in each others' faces, then they ceased to respect an oath, and the sanctity of their domestic life was exchanged for the most abominable prostitution." Now this is false-a naked lie. All that has been called religion, has hitherto been the promoter of every kind of immorality and debauchery among men. Those weak minds who believe in it know that, at the last hour, they can have redemption of their sins through the blood of the Lamb which was shed for all; and those of stronger minds, who are interested in perpetuating the existing plunder and oppression, never let the dogmas of religion restrain their rapacity. A fig for the other world! give us this, and take heaven entirely to yourself, say the priest and the oppressor." For it were easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." It would seem, indeed, as if the dogmas of religion were invented for the purpose of testing the powers of human credulity as if there was no verbal or moral contradiction but what they could compel us to acknowledge, in entire defiance of our physical faculties. The object of all priesthood, from the pope at the Vatican to the ranting sectarian, is to live at ease upon the labours of others. "They toil not, neither do they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." In this they all agree most wonderfully. For this end they keep up a most incessant clamour against all other forms of superstition, in order to prevent their deluded followers from calmly discovering the foul imposture by which they are entangled and deluded. Religion hath never been a restraint against the oppression of the powerful, in order to sustain the poor and afflicted. Passions, mischievous to society, are never restrained by religion, or what is so called; and the doctrine of a future state has never deterred men in power from pursuing their iniquitous aggrandisements. The other world is the reward for unhappy virtue,' says one. Aye, the other world! look there for a recompense! The more you are trampled upon, galled, goaded, and plundered, the brighter will be your reward hereafter; you will become angels, archangels, and the Lord only knows what else besides. Aye, this is true and pure and undefiled religion; this is the true creed from the Thames to the Tiber, from the Nile to the Niger, from the Ganges to the Gulf of New Orleans. To shake in some degree this mighty system of superstition and of plunder was the object of Voltaire, and he succeeded more than any other man could have done that had been born about the same period of time. He was as a willow that bent before the storm which uprooted the cak. His very compliance with the forms of the church-his eagerness to be reconciled to it-his taking of the sacrament and his death, and his avowal that he died a Catholic-were but so many distinct assertions that he was compelled to bend before a power which he abhorred, and which the whole tenor of his life and writings was calculated to destroy. No man can afford to be independent even now, wheir fifty years have elapsed since the French revolution. No oaths, no promises, can be said to be binding that are extorted by superior power, whether exercised against the person, or fortune, or comforts of the victim. Is the rack the best argument of the holy and pious truths of the Christian religion? Yet is the rack trifling compared with the persecution, the calumny, that Voltaire had to experience throughout his long career-a period of upwards of fifty years. His unwearied industry, his rank as a tragic poet, his position in society as a French gentleman, his independent fortune, were all necessary to be combined in one individual to enable him to assail with success the mass of priestly power and courtly corruption. He did more than any other man could have done. He excited indignation, contempt, and derision, and the force of his ridicule was owned by men who scorned to be moved by his arguments. As a philosopher, he was the first to afford an example of a private citizen who, by his wishes and his endeavours, embraced the general history of man in every country and in every age, opposing error and oppression of every kind, and defending and promulgating every useful truth. The history of whatever has been done in Europe, in favour of reason and humanity, is the history of his labour and beneficent acts. If the liberty of the press be increased; if the Catholic clergy have lost their dangerous power, and have been deprived of some of their most scandalous wealth; if the love of humanity be now the common language of all governments; if the continent of Europe have been taught that men possess a right to the use of reason; if religious prejudices have been eradicated from the higher classes of society, and in part effaced from the hearts of the common people: if we have beheld the masks stripped from the faces of those religious sectaries who were privileged in imposing on the world; and if reason for the first time has begun to shed its clear and uniform light over all Europe-we shall everywhere discover, in the history of the changes that have been effected, the name of Voltaire. It only remains to explain to the reader, that the French edition of the Philosophical Dictionary from which this translation is made, is a far more comprehensive collection than the one originally published under that name by Voltaire. It contains not only that work, but the contents of another publication called "Questions on the Encyclopædia;" of a manuscript dictionary entitled a "Dictionary of Opinion;" the articles of Voltaire inserted in the French Encyclopædia; a few designed for the Dictionary of the French Academy; and various minor pieces of a still more miscellaneous nature. Like all other dictionaries of facts and opinions connected with the progress of knowledge, time has made some havoc connected with a portion of its contents. Several articles are superseded by the extension of physical and economical science since they were written, as well as by increased information in every direction. These necessary omissions are augmented by leaving out a portion of disquisition which never could interest out of France, nor even in France any longer; including remarks on very local and obsolete laws; on minute peculiarities of the French language, and critical observations on the passing drama, and on French poetry, which have been repeated from other sources almost to satiety. Some repetitions, also, for which the French editors claim indulgence in a work thus got together, are carefully removed. These, and a few other kindred reductions, will reduce the work only about one-eighth of the original; and by giving a small but remarkably clear type, the publisher is able to supply the public with a work for Ten Shillings which before cost Fifty; and at the same time, for elegance and neatness, will be found worthy a place in the collection of every man of liberal and independent mind, who esteems genius, reverences truth, and detests priest craft, superstition, and tyranny. A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY.· From the French of Voltaire. A. THE letter A has been accounted sacred in almost every nation, because it was the first letter. The Egyptians added this to their numberless superstitions; hence it was that the Greeks of Alexandria called it hier'alpha; and, as omega was the last of the letters, these words alpha and omega signified the beginning and the end of all things. This was the origin of the cabalistic art, and of more than one mysterious folly. from alpha; one is first, the other is second, and no one knows why. How can it have happened that terms are still wanting to express the portal of all the sciences? The knowledge of numbers, the art of numeration, is not called the one-two: yet the first rudiment of the art of expressing our thoughts has not in all Europe obtained a proper designation. The alphabet is the first part of grammar; perhaps those who are acquainted with Arabic, of which I have not the slightest notion, can inform me whether The letters served as cyphers, and to that language, which is said to contain no express musical notes. Judge what an fewer than eighty words to express a infinity of useful knowledge must thus horse, has one which signifies the alphabet. have been produced. A, b, c, d, e, f, g, I protest that I know no more of were the seven heavens; the harmony of Chinese than of Arabic; but I have read, the celestial spheres was composed of the in a small Chinese vocabulary, that this seven first letters; and an acrostic ac-nation has always had two words to excounted for everything among the ever-press the catalogue or list of the characvenerable Ancients. A, B, C, OR ALPHABET. ters of its language; one is ko-tou, the other hai-pien: we have neither ko-tou nor hai-pien in our Occidental tongues. The Greeks, who were no more adroit Why has not the alphabet a name in than ourselves, also said alphabet. Seneca any European language? Alphabet sig- the philosopher used the Greek phrase to nifies nothing more than A, B, and A, designate an old man who, like me, asks B, signifies nothing, or but indicates two questions on grammar, calling him Skedon sounds, which two sounds have no rela-analphabetos. Now the Greeks had this tion to each other, Beta is not formed same alphabet from the Phenicians-from that people called the letter nation by the Hebrews themselves, when the latter, at so late a period, went to settle in their neighbourhood. to Colchis to establish a trade in sheep skins,-whence we have the fable of the golden fleece,-they communicated their letters to the people of the country, who still retain them with some alteration. They have not adopted the alphabet of the Turks, to whom they are at present subject, but whose yoke, thanks to the Empress of Russia, I hope they will throw off. It may well be supposed that the Phenicians, by communicating their characters to the Greeks, rendered them a great service in delivering them from the embarrassment occasioned by the Egyptian mode of writing taught them by Cecrops. The Phenicians, in the capacity It is very likely (I do not say it is of merchants, sought to make everything certain-God forbid !) that neither Tyre easy of comprehension; while the Egyp-nor Egypt, nor any other country situated tians, in their capacity of interpreters of near the Mediterranean Sea, communithe Gods, strove to make everythingcated its alphabet to the nations of difficult. I can imagine I hear a Phenician merchant landed in Achaia saying to a Greek correspondent, "Our characters are not only easy to write, and communicate the thoughts as well as the sound of the voice; they also express our respective debts. My aleph, which you choose to pronounce alpha, stands for an ounce of silver, beta for two ounces, tau for a hundred, sigma for two hundred. I owe you two hundred ounces; I pay you a tau, and shall owe you another tau; thus we shall soon make our reckoning.' It was most probably by mutual traffic, which administered to their wants, that society was first established among men; and it is necessary that those between whom commerce is carried on, should understand one another. Eastern Asia. If, for example, the Tyrians, or the Chaldeans, who dwelt near the Euphrates, had communicated their method to the Chinese, some traces of it would have remained; we should have had the signs of the twenty.two, twenty-three, or twenty-four letters: whereas they have a sign for each word in their language; and the number of their words, we are told, are eighty thousand. This method has nothing in common with that of Tyre; it is seventynine thousand nine hundred and seventysix times more learned and more embarrassing than our own. Besides this prodigious difference, they write from the top to the bottom of the page; while the Tyrians and the Chaldeans wrote from right to left, and the Greeks, like ourselves, wrote from left to right. Examine the Tartar, the Hindoo, the Siamese, the Japanese characters; you will not find the least resemblance to the Greek or Phenician alphabet. The Egyptians did not apply themselves to commerce until a very late period; they had a horror of the sea; it was their Typhon. The Tyrians, on the contrary, were navigators from time immemorial; they brought together those nations which Nature had separated, and repaired those calamities into which the revolutions of the world frequently plunged a large portion of mankind. The Greeks in their turn, carried to other nations their commerce and their convenient alphabet, which latter was altered a little,cordant, insupportable bass, and of the as the Greeks had altered that of the Tyrians. When their merchants, who were afterwards made demi-gods, went Yet all these nations, and not these alone, but even the Hottentots and Caffres, pronounce the vowels and consonants as we do, because the larynx in them is essentially the same as in us-just as the throat of the rudest boor is made like that of the finest opera singer, the difference, which makes of one a rough, dis other a voice sweeter than the nightingale's, being imperceptible to the most acute anatomist; or as the brain of a fool M May we not also, without offending any one, suppose that the alphabet originated in cries and exclamations? Infants of themselves articulate one sound when an object catches their attention, another when they laugh, and a third when they are whipped- which they ought not to be. is for all the world like the brain of a { persons say that it was that of Lower great genius. Brittany: we may surely, without When we said that the Tyrian mer-offending either the people of Brittany or chants taught the Greeks their A, B, C, those of Samaria, admit no original we did not pretend that they also taught tongue. them to speak. It is probable that the Athenians already expressed themselves in a better manner than the people of Lower Syria; their throats were more flexible, and their words were a more happy assemblage of vowels, consonants, and dipthongs. The language of the Phenician people was rude and gross, consisting of such words as Shasiroth, Ashtaroth, Shabaoth, Chotiket, Thopheth, cc-enough to terrify a songstress from the opera of Naples. Suppose, that the Romans of the present day had retained the ancient Etrurian alphabet, and some Dutch traders brought them that which they now use; the Romans would do very well to receive their characters, but it is not at all likely that they would speak the Batavian language. Just so would the people of Athens deal with the sailors of Capthor, who had come from Tyre or Berith; they would adopt their alphabet as being better than that of Misaim or Egypt, but would reject their speech. Philosophically speaking, and setting aside all inferences to be drawn from the Holy Scriptures, which certainly are not here the subject of discussion,-is not the primitive language a truly laughable As for the two little boys whom the Egyptian king Psammeticus (which, by the by, is not an Egyptian word) brought up, in order to know what was the primitive language, it seems hardly possible that they should both have cried bee bee when they wanted their breakfast. chimera? From exclamations formed by vowels -as natural to children as croaking is to frogs-the transition to a complete alphabetis not so great as it may be thought. A mother must always have said to her child the equivalent of come, go, take, leave, hush! &c. These words represent nothing; they describe nothing; but a gesture makes them intelligible. From these shapeless rudiments we have, it is true, an immense distance to travel before we arrive at syntax. It is almost terrifying to contemplate that from the simple word come, we have arrived at such sentences as the following:-Mother I should have come with pleasure, and should have obeyed your commands, whien are ever dear to me, if I had not, wher running towards you, fallen backwards, which caused a thorn to run into my left What would be thought of a man who should seek to discover what had been the primitive cry of all animals; and sheep bleat, cats mew, doves coo, linnetsleg. how it happens that, after a series of ages, whistle? They understand one another It appears to my astonished imaginaperfectly in their respective idioms, and tion that it must have required ages to much better than we do. Every species adjust this sentence, and ages more to put was never that of Peru; there has no more endeavour to tell the reader how such has its language; that of the Esquimaux it into language. Here we might tell or been a primitive language, alphabet, than there have been primitive every language of the earth, as father, or a primitive words are expressed and pronounced in aks or primitive grass. mother, land, water, day, night, eating, Several Rabbis assert that the Sama- { drinking, &c., but we must, as much as Fita was the 1 |