Voltaire addresses the author of that work in the following words: "In the state of doubt in which we both are, I do not say to you, with Pascal, 'choose the safest.' There is no safety in uncertainty. We are here not to talk, but to examine; we must judge, and our judgment is not determined by our will. I do not propose to you to believe extravagant things in order to escape embarassment. I do not say to you, 'Go to Mecca, and instruct yourself by kissing the black stone, take hold of a cow's tail, muffle yourself in a scapulary, or be imbecile and fanatical to acquire the favor of the Being of beings.' I say to you, 'Continue to cultivate virtue, to be beneficent, to regard all superstition with horror, or with pity; but adore, with me, the design which is manifested in all nature, and consequently the author of that design--the primordial and final cause of all; hope with me that our monade, which reasons on the great eternal Being, may be happy through that same great Being. There is no contradiction in this. You can no more demonstrate its impossibility than I can demonstrate mathematically that it is so. In metaphysics we scarcely reason on anything but probabilities. We are all swimming in a sea of which we have never seen the shore. Woe be to those who fight while they swim! Land who can; but he that cries out to me, "You swim in vain, there is no land," disheartens me, and deprives me of all my strength. What is the object of our dispute? To console our unhappy existence. Who consoles it--you or I? You yourself own, in some passages of your work, that the belief in a God has withheld some men on the brink of crime; for me this acknowledgment is enough. If this opinion had prevented but ten assassinations, but ten calumnies, but ten iniquitous judgments on the earth, I hold that the whole earth ought to embrace it.' "--_Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary._
This Voltaire says: "The laws punished public crimes; it was necessary to establish a check upon secret crimes; this check was to be found only in religion." In the same article we find the following: "We are obliged to hold intercourse and transact business and mix up in life with knaves possessing little or no reflection; with vast numbers of persons addicted to brutality, intoxication and rapine. You may, if you please, preach to them that there is no hell, and that the soul of man is mortal. As for myself, I will be sure to thunder in their ears that if they rob me they will inevitably be damned." His true position upon the hell question is, that it is necessary to preach hell to the blind and brutal populace, that there is a real necessity for such teaching, whether it be true or false. He seems to regard it untrue, but necessary. What an idea! The harmony and consistency of unbelievers is (?) grand. It is no wonder that Voltaire's name should stand, along with the names of Atheists and Pantheists and Deists, above the head line upon the first page of the _Boston Investigator_.