Sermons were their only labours; Mandeville goes much further; he asserts that bees cannot live at their ease in a great and powerful hive, without many vices. No kingdom, no state (says he) can flourish without vices. Take away the vanity of ladies of quality, and there will be no more fine manufactures of silk, no more employment for men and women in a thousand different branches; a great part of the nation will be reduced to beggary. Take away the avarice of our merchants, and the fleets of England will be annihilated. Deprive artists of envy, and emulation will cease; we shall sink back into primitive rudeness and ignorance. It is quite true that a well governed society turns every vice to account; but it is not true that these vices are necessary to the well-being of the world. Very good remedies may be made from poisons, but poisons do not contribute to the support of life. By thus reducing the Fable of the Bees to its just value, it might be made a work of moral utility. BEGGAR-MENDICANT. EVERY Country where begging, where mendicity, is a profession, is ill governed. Beggary, as I have elsewhere said, is a vermin that clings to opulence. Yes; but let it be shaken off; let the hospitals be for sickness and age alone, and let the shops be for the young and vigorous.* * Mendicity is the opprobrium of almost all the old catholic countries; and there are reasoners who lament the fall of the The following is an extract from a sermon composed by a preacher ten years ago, for the parish of St. Leu and St. Giles, which is the parish of the beggars and the convulsionaries: Pauperes evangelicantur,-the Gospel is preached to the poor. "My dear brethren the beggars, what is meant by the word Gospel? It signifies good news. It is, then, good news that I come to tell you; and what is it? It is, that if you are idlers, you will die on a dunghill. Know that there have been idle kings, so at least we are told; and they at last had not where to lay their heads. If you work, you will be as happy as other men. "The preachers at St. Eustache and St. Roche may deliver to the rich very fine sermons in a flowery style, which procure for the auditors a light slumber with an easy digestion, and for the orator a thousand crowns; but I address those whom hunger keeps awake. Work for your bread, I say; for the Scripture says, that he who does not work deserves not to eat. Our brother in adversity, Job, who was for some time in your condition, says that man is born to labour as the bird is to fly. Look at this immense city: every one is busy; the judges rise at four in the morning to administer justice to you, and send you to the galleys when your idleness has caused you to thieve rather awkwardly. "The king works; he attends his council every day; and he has made campaigns. Perhaps you will say, he is none the richer. Granted; but that is not his fault. The financiers know, better than you or I do, that not one-half his revenue ever enters his coffers. has been obliged to sell his plate, in order to defend us He monasteries in England, which gave so much away in charity, that is to say, supported a lazzaroni of the most wretched description, in indolence, superstition, and vice. Voltaire, in this paragraph, hints at the grand difficulty in all provision for poverty, that of separating unavoidable calamity from the misery which is self-created.-T. against our enemies. We should aid him in our turn. The Friend of Man (l'Ami des Hommes) allows him only seventy-five millions per annum. Another friend all at once gives him seven hundred and forty. But of all these Job's comforters, not one will advance him a single crown. It is necessary to invent a thousand ingenious ways of drawing this crown from our pockets, which, before it reaches his own, is diminished by at least one-half. "Work, then, my dear brethren; act for yourselves, for I forewarn you, that if you do not take care of yourselves no one will take care of you; you will be treated as the king has been in several grave remonstrances; people will say, God help you.' "We will go into the provinces, you will answer; we shall be fed by the lords of the land, by the farmers, by the curates. Do not flatter yourselves, my dear brethren, that you shall eat at their tables: they have for the most part enough to do to feed themselves, notwithstanding the "Method of rapidly getting rich by Agriculture," and fifty other works of the same kind, published every day at Paris, for the use of the people in the country, with cultivating of which the authors never had anything to do. "I behold among you young men of some talent, who say that they will make verses, that they will write pamphlets, like Chisiac, Nonotte, or Patouillet; that they will work for the "Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques," that they will write sheets for Fréron, funeral orations for bishops, songs for the comic opera. Any of these would at least be an occupation. When a man is writing for the " Année Littéraire," he is not robbing on the highway, he is only robbing his creditors. But do better, my dear brethren in Jesus Christ, my dear beggars, who, by passing your lives in asking charity, run the risk of the galleys-do better; enter one of the four mendicant orders: you will then be not only rich, but honoured also." BEKKER, THE WORLD BEWITCHED," THE DEVIL, THE BOOK OF ENOCH, AND SORCERERS. THIS Balthazar Bekker, a very good man, a great enemy of the everlasting hell and the devil, and a still greater of precision, made a great deal of noise in his time by his great book, " The World Bewitched." One Jacques-George de Chaufepied, a pretended continuator of Bayle, assures us that Bekker learned Greek at Gascoigne. Niceron has good reasons for believing that it was at Franeker. This historical point has occasioned much doubt and trouble at court. The fact is, that in the time of Bekker, a minister of the Holy Gospel (as they say in Holland) the devil was still in prodigious credit among divines of all sorts, in the middle of the seventeenth century, in spite of the good spirits which were beginning to enlighten the world. Witchcraft, possessions, and everything else attached to that fine divinity, were in vogue throughout Europe, and frequently had fatal results. A century had scarcely elapsed since king James himself,-called by Henry IV. Master James,—that great enemy of the Roman communion and the papal power, had published his Demonology (what a book for a king!) and in his Demonology had admitted sorceries, incubuses, and succubuses, and acknowledged the power of the devil, and of the pope, who, according to him, had just as good a right to drive Satan from the bodies of the possessed as any other priest. And we, miserable Frenchmen, who boast of having recovered some small part of our senses, in what a horrid sink of stupid barbarism were we then immersed! Not a parliament, not a presidial court, but was occupied in trying sorcerers; not a great jurisconsult, who did not write memorials on possessions by the devil. France resounded with the cries of poor imbecile creatures whom the judges, after making them believe that they had danced round a cauldron, tortured and put to death without pity, in horrible torments. Catholics and pro testants were alike infected with this absurd and frightful superstition; the pretext being, that in one of the Christian gospels, it is said that disciples were sent to east out devils. It was a sacred duty to put girls to the torture, in order to make them confess that they had lain with Satan, and that they had fallen in love with him in the form of a goat. All the particulars of the meetings of the girls with this goat were detailed in the trials of the unfortunate individuals. They were burned at last, whether they confessed or denied; and France was one vast theatre of judicial carnage. I have before me a collection of these infernal proceedings, made by a counsellor of the parliament of Bordeaux, named De Langre, and addressed to Monseigneur Silleri, chancellor of France, without Monseigneur Silleri's having ever thought of enlightening those infamous magistrates. But, indeed, it would have been necessary to begin by enlightening the chancellor himself. What was France at that time! A continual St. Bartholomew,-from the massacre of Vassy to the assassination of marshal D'Ancre and his innocent wife. Will it be believed that, in the time of this very Bekker, a poor girl, named Magdalen Chaudron, who had been persuaded that she was a witch, was burned at Geneva? The following is a very exact summary of the procèsverbal of this absurd and horrid act, which is not the last monument of the kind : "Michelle, having met the devil as she was going out of the town, the devil gave her a kiss, received her homage, and imprinted on her upper lip and her right breast the mark which it is his custom to affix on all persons whom he recognises as his favourites. This seal of the devil is a small sign -manual, which, as demonological jurisconsults affirm, renders the skin insensible. "The devil ordered Michelle Chaudron to bewitch two girls; and she immediately obeyed her lord. The relatives of the young women judicially charged her |