While thus living in the country, Volta's piety became a sort of proverb among the country people. Every morning at an early hour, in company with his servant, he could be seen with bowed head making his way to the church. Here he heard mass, and usually the office of the day, in which all the canons of the cathedral took part. He had a special place on the epistle side of the altar, not far from the organ. His favorite method of prayer was the rosary. He was not infrequently held up to the people by the parish priest as a model of devotion. Whenever he was in the country, every evening saw him taking his walk towards the church. On these occasions, he was usually accompanied by members of his family, and they entered the church for an evening visit to the blessed sacrament.
His behavior toward those who lived in the vicinity of his country place endeared him to all the peasantry. He was not only liberal in giving alms, but made it a point to visit frequently the houses of the poor and help them as much as possible by counsel and suggestion. His scientific knowledge was at command for their benefit, and he was often able to tell them how to avoid many dangers. He gave them definite ideas with regard to the importance of cleanliness and the necessity of cooking their food very carefully so as to prevent diseases occasioned by badly cooked material. He also taught them to distinguish between the wholesome and the spurred rye, from which their polenta was prepared, in order to escape the dreaded pellagra, the disease so common in Italy, which comes from the use of diseased grain.
He endeared himself so much to the people of the countryside that they invented a special name for him, which proclaimed the tenderness of their liking for the man. They knew how much he was honored for his wonderful discoveries in electricity, and many of them had even seen some of the (to them at least) inexplicable phenomena that he could produce at will by means of various electrical contrivances. At first they called him a "magician"; but as this word has, particularly for the Italian peasantry, a suspicion of evil in it, they added the adjective "beneficent," and he was generally known as Il mago benefico.
His interest in these gentle, kindly people may be appreciated from the fact that he knew practically all of his country neighbors by name, and, as a rule, he was familiar also with the conditions of their families and their household affairs. Not infrequently he would stop and talk to them about such things, and this favor was always considered as a precious mark of his neighborly courtesy by the peasantry.
Such was the simplicity of the man whose name is undoubtedly one of the greatest in the history of science. The great beginnings of the chapter on applied electricity are all his. There was nothing he touched in his work that he did not illuminate. His was typically the mind of the genius, ever reaching out beyond the boundaries of the known—an abundant source of leading and light for others. Far from being a doubter in matters religious, his scientific greatness seemed only to make him readier to submit to what are sometimes spoken of as the shackles of faith, though to him belief appealed as a completion of knowledge of things beyond the domain of sense or the ordinary powers of intellectual acquisition. Like Pasteur, a century later, the more he knew, the more ready was he to believe and the more satisfying he found his faith. This is a very different picture of the great scientific mind from that ordinarily presented as characteristic of scientific thinkers. But Volta is not an exception; rather does he represent the rule, so far as the very great scientists are concerned; for it is only the second-rate minds, those destined to follow but not to lead, in science, who have so constantly proclaimed the opposition of science to faith.
Volta's well-known confession of faith declares his state of mind with regard to religion better than any words of a biographer, and it is a striking commentary on the impression that has in some inexplicable way gained wide acceptance, that a man cannot be a great scientist and a firm believer in religion. A distinguished professor of psychology at one of the large American universities said not long since, that a scientist must keep his science and religion apart, or there will be serious consequences for his religion. Volta's opinion in this matter is worth remembering. Having heard it said that, though he continued to practice his religion, this was more because he did not want to offend friends, that he did not care to scandalize his neighbors, and did not want the poor folk around him to be led by his example into giving up what he knew to be their most fruitful source of consolation in the trials of life, while in the full exercise of his intellectual faculties, Volta deliberately wrote out his confession of faith so that all the world of his own and the after time might know it.
"If some of my faults and negligences may have by chance given occasion to some one to suspect me of infidelity, I am ready, as some reparation for this and for any other good purpose, to declare to such a one and to every other person and on every occasion and under all circumstances that I have always held, and hold now, the Holy Catholic Religion as the only true and infallible one, thanking without end the good God for having gifted me with such a faith, in which I firmly propose to live and die, in the lively hope of attaining eternal life. I recognize my faith as a gift of God, a supernatural faith. I have not, on this account, however, neglected to use all human means that could confirm me more and more in it and that might drive away any doubt which could arise to tempt me in matters of faith. I have studied my faith with attention as to its foundations, reading for this purpose books of apologetics as well as those written with a contrary purpose, and trying to appreciate the arguments pro and contra. I have tried to realize from what sources spring the strongest arguments which render faith most credible to natural reason and such as cannot fail to make every well-balanced mind which has not been perverted by vice or passion embrace it and love it. May this protest of mine, which I have deliberately drawn up and which I leave to posterity, subscribed with my own hand and which shows to all and everyone that I do not blush at the Gospel—may it, as I have said, produce some good fruit.—Signed at Milan, Jan. 6th, 1815, Alessandro Volta."
When Volta wrote this, he was just approaching his sixtieth year and was in the full maturity of his powers. He lived for twelve years after this, looked up to as one of the great thinkers of Europe and as one of the most important men of Italy of this time. Far from being in his dotage, then, he was at the moment surely, if ever, in the best position to know his own mind with regard to his faith and his relations to the Creator.
There is a famous picture of Volta, by Magaud, in Marseilles. It chronicles the fact that Volta had become a Count, a Senator and a Member of the French Institute, so appointed by Napoleon, and that he is in some sense therefore a Frenchman. Magaud has painted him standing, with his electric apparatus on one side and the Scriptures on the other. Near him is placed his friend Sylvio Pellico, whose little book, "My Ten Years' Imprisonment," has endeared him to thousands of readers all over the world. Pellico had doubted the presence of Providence in the world and the existence of a hereafter. In the midst of his doubts, he turned to Volta. "In thy old age, O Volta!" said Pellico, "the hand of Providence placed in thy pathway a young man gone astray. Oh! thou, said I to the ancient seer, who hast plunged deeper than others into the secrets of the Creator, teach me the road that will lead me to the light." And the old man made answer: "I too have doubted, but I have sought. The great scandal of my youth was to behold the teachers of those days lay hold of science to combat religion. For me to-day I see only God everywhere."