Free A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler Page B

really more of what would later be called an encyclopedia, a collection of essays on various wide-ranging subjects. The form had become extremely popular by that time. The book that established the genre was the Dictionnaire historique et critique , which had been written in Holland in 1697 by the man Voltaire had called “the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote,” the French intellectual Pierre Bayle. Bayle’s Dictionnaire , like Voltaire’s, was extremely controversial. Bayle was a Huguenot, as the French Calvinists were known. He had fled the religious strife of France in the seventeenth century for the freedom of the Netherlands, where he was able to pursue his radical notions of religious tolerance and skepticism. Though Bayle always professed to have retained his Calvinist faith, his book implied that no reasonable person could believe the stories contained in the Bible. His critics called him godless. Some of his admirers said it too. Back in France, his writings led to the arrest of his father (a Calvinist minister) and of his brother. His brother would die in prison.
    Bayle’s Dictionnaire became the most widely read book of philosophy of the eighteenth century. Voltaire himself wrote a preface to a later edition. The book was also immensely influential in intellectual circles, helping to shape some of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson insisted that it be included among the first hundred books that wouldform the American Library of Congress. Publishers were soon flooded by similar books, each seemingly more radical than those that came before. Many of these works challenged religious conventions. Some had even begun to brazenly question the very existence of God, even though to do so was risky. It could even be deadly. In 1757, amid the reactionary climate that followed a crazed assassin’s attempt on the life of King Louis XV, the French Parliament had passed a slew of repressive measures, including the death penalty for anyone who “composed and printed writings tending to attack religion.”
    Nobody understood the risks better than Voltaire. “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong,” he once wrote. There was a time in his life when he seemed to thrill in testing such dangers. He would even court them. But by the time of de la Barre’s execution, Voltaire was seventy-one. He was still physically able and mentally sharp, which he liked to say was because he fasted periodically, drank thirty cups of coffee a day, and ignored the advice of doctors. Age, however, had made him cautious.
    Voltaire had published his Dictionnaire anonymously in Geneva in 1764, using a publisher that specialized in dealing with forbidden books. There were many such publishers in that city, each with their own smuggling rings that specialized in slipping their wares into foreign countries. These same publishers also dealt in saucy books that passed for erotica at the time. The two genres sold extremely well, and their printers put both in the category of “philosophic books.”
    No one was fooled about the authorship of the Dictionnaire philosophique . Voltaire was renowned for not being able to keep a secret, especially when it involved a project in which he had invested so much of himself. The book had taken him twelve years to write. He considered it his life’s work, a compendium of all the wisdom he had gained and a summation of his philosophy. Yet when it was eventually banned and copies were burned in town squares all over France, Voltaire simply shrugged his shoulders and pretended not to care. Worse things could happen to a writer.
    Voltaire had taken care to couch many of the book’s more controversiallines, especially those regarding Christianity, using a style of writing called “reportage,” as if he were simply reporting the opinions of others. In truth, his private views on religion were