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Updated: June 8, 2025
The value of the testimony of a catholic priest, who in his last moments recanted the errors of his faith and asked God's pardon for having taught the catholic religion, was fully appreciated by Voltaire, who highly commended this grand work of Meslier. Robert Clifford, F. R. S., and printed in London in 1798.
The power of Catholicism is surely declining throughout Europe; and if it has become aggressive in our American cities, is it not because the friends of freedom have forgotten the well-known axiom that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"? New York, May 21, 1889. Some years ago a copy of John Meslier fell into my hands.
The curate Meslier has gone further yet than Woolston; he dares to treat the transport of our Saviour by the devil upon the mountain, the wedding of Cana, the bread and the fishes, as absurd fables, injurious to divinity, which were ignored during three hundred years by the whole Roman Empire, and finally passed from the lower class to the palace of the emperors, when policy obliged them to adopt the follies of the people in order the more easily to subjugate them.
In this faith I offer it now to the public, and I hope that the name of John Meslier will be honored as one of the greatest benefactors of humanity. It is said that truth is generally revealed by dying lips.
M. de Mailly, Archbishop of Rheims, before whom the case was brought, condemned him. But the Sunday which followed this decision, the abbot Meslier stood in his pulpit and complained of the sentence of the cardinal. "This is," said he, "the general fate of the poor country priest; the archbishops, who are great lords, scorn them and do not listen to them.
Here is what Voltaire and d'Alembert thought of the curate Meslier and of his work. Their letters are presented here in order to excite curiosity and convince the judgment: VOLTAIRE TO D'ALEMBERT. FERNEY, February, 1762. They have printed in Holland the Testament of Jean Meslier. I trembled with horror in reading it.
He keeps nothing back; and yet, after all, the wonder is not that there should have been one priest who left that testimony at his death, but that all priests do not. True, there is a great deal more to be said about religion, which I believe to be an eternal necessity of human nature, but no man has uttered the negative side of the matter with so much candor and completeness as Jean Meslier."
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