The Essays, vol 12 | Page 6

lie against a man's own knowledge?
Lying is a base vice; a vice that one of the ancients portrays in the most
odious colours when he says, "that it is to manifest a contempt of God,
and withal a fear of men." It is not possible more fully to represent the
horror, baseness, and irregularity of it; for what can a man imagine
more hateful and contemptible than to be a coward towards men, and
valiant against his Maker? Our intelligence being by no other way
communicable to one another but by a particular word, he who falsifies
that betrays public society. 'Tis the only way by which we
communicate our thoughts and wills; 'tis the interpreter of the soul, and
if it deceive us, we no longer know nor have further tie upon one
another; if that deceive us, it breaks all our correspondence, and
dissolves all the ties of government. Certain nations of the newly
discovered Indies (I need not give them names, seeing they are no more;
for, by wonderful and unheardof example, the desolation of that
conquest has extended to the utter abolition of names and the ancient
knowledge of places) offered to their gods human blood, but only such
as was drawn from the tongue and ears, to expiate for the sin of lying,
as well heard as pronounced. That good fellow of Greece--[Plutarch,
Life of Lysander, c. 4.]--said that children are amused with toys and
men with words.
As to our diverse usages of giving the lie, and the laws of honour in
that case, and the alteration they have received, I defer saying what I
know of them to another time, and shall learn, if I can, in the
meanwhile, at what time the custom took beginning of so exactly
weighing and measuring words, and of making our honour interested in
them; for it is easy to judge that it was not anciently amongst the

Romans and Greeks. And it has often seemed to me strange to see them
rail at and give one another the lie without any quarrel. Their laws of
duty steered some other course than ours. Caesar is sometimes called
thief, and sometimes drunkard, to his teeth. We see the liberty of
invective they practised upon one another, I mean the greatest chiefs of
war of both nations, where words are only revenged with words, and do
not proceed any farther.

CHAPTER XIX
OF LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE
'Tis usual to see good intentions, if carried on without moderation, push
men on to very vicious effects. In this dispute which has at this time
engaged France in a civil war, the better and the soundest cause no
doubt is that which maintains the ancient religion and government of
the kingdom. Nevertheless, amongst the good men of that party (for I
do not speak of those who only make a pretence of it, either to execute
their own particular revenges or to gratify their avarice, or to conciliate
the favour of princes, but of those who engage in the quarrel out of true
zeal to religion and a holy desire to maintain the peace and government
of their country), of these, I say, we see many whom passion transports
beyond the bounds of reason, and sometimes inspires with counsels
that are unjust and violent, and, moreover, rash.
It is certain that in those first times, when our religion began to gain
authority with the laws, zeal armed many against all sorts of pagan
books, by which the learned suffered an exceeding great loss, a disorder
that I conceive to have done more prejudice to letters than all the
flames of the barbarians. Of this Cornelius Tacitus is a very good
testimony; for though the Emperor Tacitus, his kinsman, had, by
express order, furnished all the libraries in the world with it,
nevertheless one entire copy could not escape the curious examination
of those who desired to abolish it for only five or six idle clauses that
were contrary to our belief.

They had also the trick easily to lend undue praises to all the emperors
who made for us, and universally to condemn all the actions of those
who were adversaries, as is evidently manifest in the Emperor Julian,
surnamed the Apostate,
[The character of the Emperor Julian was censured, when Montaigne
was at Rome in 1581, by the Master of the Sacred Palace, who,
however, as Montaigne tells us in his journal (ii. 35), referred it to his
conscience to alter what he should think in bad taste. This Montaigne
did not do, and this chapter supplied Voltaire with the greater part of
the praises he bestowed upon the Emperor.--Leclerc.]
who was, in truth, a very great and rare man, a man in whose soul
philosophy was imprinted in the best