The Sermon of the Fifty

A pamphlet dated 1749, and in fact printed in 1762, holds that the Bible fails the test every religion must pass: its stories offend against the morality that all peoples share. Its title page reported that some attributed it to Du Marsais, a grammarian who had written for the Encyclopédie, and others to La Mettrie, the materialist doctor at the Prussian court, but that its real author was a great and learned prince, meaning Frederick II of Prussia. Both men were dead by then. The author was Voltaire, who had lived at Frederick's court in the early 1750s and who never acknowledged the piece. Its frame is a society of fifty educated and devout people who meet every Sunday in a large trading town to pray, hear one of their number preach, dine together and collect for the poor. The sermon's rule is that true religion is what all nations hold in common, the worship of one God and the practice of justice, and that whatever divides them is false. Two of its three parts take the Old Testament through its massacres, deceptions and improbabilities; the third turns to the Gospels, which it finds contradicting one another, and to the church built on them. The preacher asks the clergy to keep their property and preach what most of them privately believe. In October 1762 Voltaire wrote to Damilaville, a Paris tax official and one of his closest correspondents, that the sermon was edifying and that twenty copies were doing much good near his home, along with his abridgement of the testament of Jean Meslier, a village priest whose attack on religion was found after his death in 1729. He kept it out of every edition of his works printed under his supervision; the editors who published his works after his death counted it the first in which he attacked Christianity head-on. When he wrote it is still disputed, and the Oxford edition of his complete works places it among his writings of 1758 and 1759.