The crusade against the idols

“Gibbon reproached Voltaire for being ‘a bigot, an intolerant bigot,’ implying that, in his relentless crusade against Christianity, Voltaire had jeapordized (rather than, as later commentators imagined, established) his character as a philosophic historian…Individuals and institutions, which [the philosophic historian] could only condemn as in themselves criminal and perverse, at moments contributed positively to human society, while…those he admired or loved may, despite their best endeavors, have exerted a harmful influence.” —David Womersley, author of “The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”