Ferney. To one of his correspondents he says he is "bending under the weight of eighty-four years, and as many disorders." The excitement of his triumph at Paris proved too much for him. He was seized with a profuse bleeding from the lungs, and felt the approach of death.

The account of this most impressive period in the life of his subject, Lord Brougham appears to have taken implicitly from Condorcet, a man too deeply pledged to philosophism to be trusted in his description of an infidel death-bed.

"While in his last illness the clergy had come around him; and as all the philosophers of that period appear to have felt particularly anxious that no public stigma should be cast upon them by a refusal of Christian burial, they persuaded him to undergo confession and absolution. He had a few weeks before submitted to this ceremony, and professed to die in the Catholic faith in which he was born-a ceremony which M. Condorcet may well say, gave less edification to the devout than it did scandal to the free-thinkers. The Curé (rector) of St. Sulpice had, on this being related, made inquiry, and found the formula too general; he required the Abbé Gauthier who had performed the office, to insist upon a more detailed profession of faith, else he should withhold the burial certificate. While this dispute was going on, the dying man recovered and put an end to it. On what proved his real death-bed, the Curé came and insisted on a full confession. When the dying man had gone a certain length, he was required to subscribe to the doctrine of our Savior's divinity. This roused his indignation; and he gave vent to it in an exclamation which at once put to flight all the doubts of the pious, and reconciled the infidels to their Patriarch. The certificate was refused; and he was buried in a somewhat clandestine, certainly a hasty manner, at the monastery of Scellières of which his nephew was Abbot."

The account given by the Abbé Baruel, and known through one channel or another to most readers of religious miscellany, is considerably more particular. The Abbé indeed gives no authority for his statements, the reason of which probably is that his work was so nearly contemporaneous with the events described. Voltaire died in 1778, and the history of Jacobinism was published some time before the close of the century. The death of Voltaire was, at all events, too recent to permit any material misrepresentation; and the Abbé challenges denial of his statements.

"In spite of all the sophisters flocking around him in the first days of his illness, he gave signs of wishing to return to the God he had so often blasphemed. His danger increasing, he wrote the following note to the Abbé Gauthier: "You had promised me, Sir, to come and hear me. I entreat you would take the trouble of calling as soon as possible. Signed, VOLTAIRE.-Paris, the 26th Feb., 1778."

A few days after he wrote the following declaration, in the presence of the same Abbé Gauthier, the Abbé Mignot, and the Marquis de Villeveille, copied from the minutes deposited with M. Momet, notary at Paris.

"I, the underwritten, declare, that for these four days past, having been afflicted with vomiting of blood, at the age of eightyfour, and not having been able to drag myself to the Church, the Rev. the Rector of St. Sulpice having been pleased to add to his good works, that of sending me the Abbé Gauthier, a priest, I confessed to him, and if it pleases God to dispose of me, I die in the Holy Catholic church in which I was born; hoping that the Divine mercy will deign to pardon all my faults: if ever I have scandalized the church, I ask pardon of God and of the Church. 2d March, 1778. VOLTAIRE.

Signed,

"In the presence of the Abbé Mignot, my nephew, and the Marquis de Villeveille, my friend.”

Voltaire had permitted this declaration to be carried to the Rector of St. Sulpice, and to the Archbishop of Paris, to know whether it would be sufficient. When the Abbé Gauthier returned with the answer, it was impossible for him to gain admittance to the patient. The conspirators had strained every nerve to hinder the chief from consummating his recantation, and every avenue was shut to the priest whom Voltaire himself had sent for. Terror and rage then got complete mastery of the dying man. D'Alembert, Diderot, and some twenty others who had beset his apartment, never came near him but to be received with reproaches and execrations. "Begone," he would exclaim, "it is you who have brought me to my present condition!" Then succeeded alternate blasphemies and prayers. Sometimes he would cry out in plaintive accents, "O Christ! O Jesus Christ!" and then would complain, that he was abandoned both by God and man. The scene was too dreadful to be endured. His friend and physician, M. Tronchin, withdrew in terror, declaring that the death-bed was awful, and that the furies of Orestes could give but a faint idea of those of Voltaire. The Marshal de Richelieu also fled, acknowledging that the scene was too terrible to bear."

To this account, a striking confirmation is added by the anecdote given by Bishop Wilson, to the effect that "the nurse who attended him, being many years afterwards requested to wait on a sick Protestant gentleman, refused till she was assured that he was not a philosopher; declaring, if he were, she would on no account incur the danger of witnessing such a scene as she had been compelled to do at the death of M. Voltaire." The excellent Prelate, in whose Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity this anecdote occurs, declares that he received the account from the son of the gentleman to whose dying bed the woman was invited. THIRD SERIES, VOL. III.

NO. 3.

7

All this was much too unphilosophical, we suppose, and much too solemn, to find any place in the Lives of Men of Letters, &c. Those, however, whose reading or experience has given them better information than Lord Brougham had, of the way in which bad men and haters of Christ do often die, will find a strong argument from analogy, for the truth of the Abbé Baruel's statement.

D'Alembert also shrank when he came to face death; and would have betrayed his remorse and fear, by calling in religion to his aid, had not Condorcet barred the door against the priest and rendered him inaccessible. Had I not been there, said Condorcet, relating the circumstances, he would have flinched also.

Diderot, too, was willing to find something better than philosophism to lean on in his last hours. He had in his employment as librarian, a young man of a religious turn of mind, who felt greatly concerned at the thought of his dying without repentance. After having, by the advice of a clergyman, made the matter a subject of prayer, he ventured to address Diderot with regard to his preparation for death. "Are you certain," said he, "that your philosophy has not left you a soul to save? I have no doubt on that point; and I cannot reflect on it without warning any benefactor to avoid the eternal misfortune that may await him. See, sir, you have yet sufficient time left; and excuse an advice which gratitude and your friendship force from me.” Diderot heard him with attention, and even melted into tears. He promised to give the subject his serious consideration.

The result was that the Curé M. de Tersac was invited to visit him; and after several conferences, Diderot prepared for a public recantation. His own private circle of friends, however, watched him as he had helped watch Voltaire. They persuaded him that he was imposed upon, and that a little country air would immediately recover him. Diderot for some time resisted their entreaties, but finally consented to try the country. His departure was kept secret. It was pretended he was still in Paris, and the deception was carried on by issuing daily reports of his health. In the mean time the jailors, who had seized his person, watched him till they had seen him expire, and then brought the body back to Paris, and gave out that he had died suddenly at table. He expired the 2d of July, 1784, and was represented as having died calm in all his atheism, with no signs of remorse. It will not be easy to satisfy any one who has had the least observation of the power of a guilty conscience, and the "fearful looking for" with which the last hours of the wicked are often attended, that all this agitation, shrinking, and sending for clergymen, respected a question of no greater importance than securing a Christian burial.

The Abbé Baruel may have been led by his alarm, and the liveliness of his imagination, to overdraw somewhat the picture he has given of the conspiracy against religion and government; but for

facts like the above, his testimony is amply sufficient. We are ourselves well informed of two instances, in a considerable Western town, in which the companions of dying infidels, seeing them begin to "flinch," closed round their bed, bolted the door against every religious person, and in one of the cases, stupified their victim with brandy, till he died. Gather not our soul, O Lord! with sinners!

Now, we will not deny that the world may be wiser and better, in the long run, because such a man as Voltaire lived in it; but we think it will be in a very different way from what Lord Brougham anticipates. That "Glory to God in the highest" will accrue from it in some way, we have no doubt.

"If plagues and earthquakes break not Heaven's design,
Why then a Borgia or a Catiline?"

At the feeble malice of those who thus take counsel against the Lord and against his Anointed, he that sitteth in the heavens sometimes laughs and has them in derision; and again speaks unto them in his anger, and vexes them in his sore displeasure. But so far as human happiness or improvement is concerned, there is a frightful deduction to be made on account of those whom Voltaire has taught to live, and fitted to die, like himself. Perhaps the man never lived, who is followed in his course through eternity by the accumulating execrations of a greater number of victims. With what dreadful vehemence (says Jay, in one of his Evening Exercises) did the writer once hear a fine young man, while dying, exclaim, again and again, O curse you, Voltaire !" How it must roll on, through age after age, here and hereafter, in one broad, deep, swelling current of blasphemies and agonies, the mind shudders to think of!

The crisis, however, is already well passed. The most formidable conspiracy ever organized against religion, with every circumstance of advantage presented by a corrupt church, and people, at that time, as Voltaire often says, half monkey, half tiger, recoiled in wide ruin on its inventors. True religion raises her placid head from the waves, as the tempest sweeps away; and now the Scriptures and the petits livres portatifs, circulated in connexion, are sowing all over France the seed of a different harvest, that shall one day wave like Lebanon, when the influence of Voltaire shall have withered like the grass of the earth.

ARTICLE V.

NICHOLAS I. AND THE FORGED LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

By Rev. EDWARD BEECHER, D.D., Boston.

IN speaking of the Forged Literature of the Middle Ages, we take the papacy of Nicholas the First, as the point of vision, A. D. 858-867; in the first place, because he first appealed to the forged Decretals, the most wonderful instance of forgery ever known in the history of the church, and then, because he is a fine exemplification of that spirit of matchless impudence with which the leaders of the corporation of Rome have imposed their forgeries and frauds on the world in all ages.

After Gregory the Great, A. D. 590-604, and before Gregory the Seventh, A. D. 1073-1085, this same Nicholas is, beyond all doubt, the most remarkable of the pontiffs. And although his name has not the same bad eminence in the popular mind with that of the notorious Hildebrand, yet so great was the influence exerted by him on the course of events, that Guizot does not hesitate to assert that the sovereignty of the Pope really takes date from his reign.

When he ascended the throne, the Popes of Rome, in their progress towards supremacy, were exposed to the resistance of four powers. The Patriarch of Constantinople, their most dangerous. spiritual rival and antagonist; the national churches of Europe, which had arisen since the invasion of the Barbarians, especially those of Italy, France, Spain, and England; the Metropolitans, an ecclesiastical nobility who ruled the bishops of particular provinces; and the civil power, whether imperial or royal.

Three of these powers were represented by two men, quite as remarkable as Nicholas himself. The chair of the see of Constantinople was filled by Photius, a man of vast native powers, of unrivalled scholarship and learning, of exhaustless energy and infinite ambition. Before he was raised to the patriarchal throne, he had passed through almost all grades of civil office and promotion.

Without entering into the details of the warfare, it is enough to say, that these ambitious rulers of the Eastern and Western Churches met in fierce encounter. Nicholas excommunicated Photius, and Photius Nicholas; and the great and incurable Greek Schism was the ultimate result.

The national churches were represented in the person of the celebrated Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, and Primate of France, the great churchman of the age, and the most learned canonist of the church.