... in him the possibility of a passionate hatred of injustice, and his interventions on behalf of persecuted or ill-used men are the high lights of his long and complicated life-story. And this being the mental disposition of Gibbon and Voltaire, and of the age in which they lived, it is natural that they should find the existence of religion in ... eighteenth-century model, and told how it fell before the Barbarian from without because of the decay through Christianity within. In our history here we have tried to set that story in a better light. To Voltaire official Christianity was "lnf...

• Word Count: 2009
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Graduate

... of suspicion; the reader and the protagonist can no longer trust anyone because signs--people, objects, words--no longer have the obvious meaning they had before the event. But the story must move inevitably towards closure, which in the realist novel involves some dissolution or resolution of the enigma: the murderer is caught, the case is solved, and the hero marries ... ...

• Word Count: 3498
• Approx Pages: 14
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Graduate