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 consubstan-
