Voltaire
ByI am currently browsing through a large volume of The Gospel Advocate, a Church of Christ newsletter that was published weekly through much of the 1800s. This blurb about that revolting atheist Voltaire caught my eye and made me smile as I have been devouring this massive tome…
From the September 11, 1866, No. 37 issue:
Nearly a hundred years ago, Voltaire resided at Geneva. One day he said to some of his friends, in a boastful, sneering tone: “Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, Christianity will have disappeared from the earth.” In that same house, in that said room where these impious words were spoken, what think you there is to-day? A large deposit of Bibles! The sacred books fill the house from the floor to the ceiling! So much for Voltaire’s prediction!
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our Lord stands forever. Amen.
Please support LCC by sharing this post on your favorite social network.
Related Content:
Norman is the creator and primary writer for LCC. Learn a little bit about him in the
That’s great!! I’d love to hear some more of these older publications read on your podcast sometime. I really enjoyed hearing portions of those old sermons in the audiobook Christianity and War.
Courtney: thanks for your comment! Yeah, the old stuff is often very enlightening, I hope to include more of this stuff over time…
I read in a tract some years ago that the late Voltaire’s home actually became the headquarters of the Geneva Bible Society – hence the stack of Bibles referred to in The Gospel Advocate.
Cool! If you could confirm that some way, that would be awesome.
Thanks for the invitation to try to verify this story, Norman.
A little digging turned up this article from the Autumn 2004 edition of “Open Society”, The Journal of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.
Here’s the link: http://www.nzarh.org.nz/journal/2004v77n1aut.pdf
An article on pages 14-17 by David Ross suggests that the Voltaire story began as a garbled account of the 1849 Annual Report of the American Bible Society. According to Mr. Ross, an Appendix to the Report contained on page 98 the following account of a $10,000 payment from the committee:
“… The committee had been able to redeem their pledge by sending
$10,000 to France, the country of Voltaire, who predicted
that in the nineteenth century the Bible would be known only
as a relic of antiquity. He [Snodgrass] could say, while on
this topic, that the Hotel Gibbon(so-called from that celebrated
infidel) is now become the very depository of the Bible Society,
and the individual who superintends the building is an agent
for the sale and receipt of the books. The very ground this illustrious scoffer often paced, has now become the scene of
the operation and success of an institution established for the
diffusion of the very book against which his efforts were
directed”
According to Mr. Ross, the Hotel Gibbon was built in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1839. It was named after the historian and noted skeptic Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), who lived for a while in a nearby villa called La Grotte while writing “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. The hotel served as a depot for the British and Foreign Bible Society from 1846-1858.
That’s awesome, Chris, thanks for searching that out!
Good discussion…I used to peruse GA volumes at Memphis while I was preparing for the ministry. As far as I know, I was the only one there who cared enough to read them. You likely know that Lipscomb’s mentor, Tolbert Fanning, was fiercely opposed to Christians’ participation in both government and war.
I think they would be pleased that people like you and Laurence Vance are keeping their work alive and running with a lot of the things they taught. Something in Lipcomb’s preface to “Civil Gov’t” inspired me: “With the request that each reader will carefully and prayerfully examine the Scriptures of sacred truth, to see if these things are true, and if true accept the truth and COURAGEOUSLY MAINTAIN IT, the writer commends this volume and those who read it to the God of all grace and love.”