THE EQUINOX
God of the Christians under the figure of a man with an ass’s
head. Christians will shrug their shoulders when they see
this knavery, and pray God for the poor ignorants who
imagine that they insult them.
M. the Count Joseph de Maistre, after having, in one of
his most eloquent paradoxes, represented the hangman as a
sacred being, and a permanent incarnation of divine justice
upon earth, suggested that one should raise to the old
man of Ferney a statue executed by the hangman. There
is depth in this thought. Voltaire, in effect, also was, in
the world, a being at the same time providential and
fatal, endowed with insensibility for the accomplishment of
his terrible functions. He was, in the domain of intelligence,
a hangman, an extirminator armed by the justice of God
Himself.
God sent Voltaire between the century of Bossuet and that
of Napoleon in order to destroy everything that separates
those two geniuses and to unite them in one alone.
He was the Samson of the spirit, always ready to shake
the columns of the temple; but in order to make him turn in
spite of himself the mill of religious progress, Providence
made him blind of heart.
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