[Voltaic Electricity], a current of electricity generated by chemical action between metals and different liquids as arranged in a voltaic battery.
[Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de], great French "persifleur" and "Coryphæus of Deism," born in Paris, son of a lawyer; trained to scoff at religion from his boyhood, and began his literary career as a satirist and in the production of lampoons which cost him twice over imprisonment in the Bastille, on his release from which he left France in 1726 and went to England, where he stayed three years, and got acquainted with the free-thinking class there; on his return to Paris he engaged in some profitable commercial speculations and published his "Charles XII.," which he had written in England, and retired to the château of Cirey, where he lived five years with Madame du Châtelet, engaged in study and diligent with his pen, with whom he left France and went to Poland, after her death paying his famous visit to Frederick the Great, with whom before three years were out he quarrelled, and from whom he was glad to escape, making his head-quarters eventually within the borders of France at Ferney, from which he now and again visited Paris, where on his last visit he was received with such raptures of adulation that he was quite overcome, and had to be conveyed home to die, giving up the ghost exactly two months after. He was a man of superlative adroitness of faculty and shiftiness, without aught that can be called great, but more than any other the incarnation of the spirit of his time; said the word which all were waiting to hear and who replied yea to it—a poor word indeed yet a potent, for it gave the death-blow to superstition, but left religion out in the cold. The general, the great offence Carlyle charges Voltaire with is, that "he intermeddled in religion without being himself in any measure religious; that he entered the Temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding, beyond the mere superficies, what Christianity was" (1694-1778).
[Voluntaryism], the doctrine that the Church should not depend on the State, but should be supported exclusively by the voluntary contributions of its members.
[Voodoo], name given to a system of magic and superstitious rites prevalent among certain negro races.
[Vortigern], a British prince of the 5th century, who, on the withdrawal of the Romans, invited the Saxons to aid him against the incursions of the Picts, to, as it proved, their own installation into sovereign power in South Britain.
[Vosges], a range of mountains in the NE. of France, since 1871 forming the Franco-German frontier by the inclusion of Alsace in German territory; they separate the basin of the Moselle from that of the Rhine.
[Voss, Johann Heinrich], German poet and scholar, born in Mecklenburg; spent most of his life in Heidelberg; his fame rests chiefly on his idyllic poem "Luise" and his translations, particularly of Homer (1751-1826).
[Vossius, Gerard], Dutch philologist, born near Heidelberg; wrote a history of Pelagianism, which brought him disfavour with the orthodox; was made a prebendary of Canterbury through the influence of Laud; was, on some apology to orthodoxy in 1633, called to the chair of History in the Gymnasium of Amsterdam; he was a friend of Grotius; he fell from a ladder in his library, and was found dead (1577-1649).
[Vulcan], the Roman god of fire and an artificer In metals, identified with the Greek [Hephæstus] (q. v.); had a temple to his honour in early Rome; was fabled to have had a forge under Mount Etna, where he manufactured thunderbolts for Jupiter, the Cyclops being his workmen.
[Vulgate], a version of the Bible in Latin executed by [St. Jerome] (q. v.), and was in two centuries after its execution universally adopted in the Western Christian Church as authoritative for both faith and practice, and from the circumstance of its general reception it became known as the Vulgate (i. e. the commonly-accepted Bible of the Church), and it is the version accepted as authentic to-day by the Roman Catholic Church, under sanction of the Council of Trent. "With the publication of it," says Ruskin, "the great deed of fixing, in their ever since undisturbed harmony and majesty, the canon of Mosaic and Apostolic Scripture, was virtually accomplished, and the series of historic and didactic books which form our present Bible (including the Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent thought of the noblest races of men living on the terrestrial globe, as a direct message to them from its Maker, containing whatever it was necessary for them to learn of His purposes towards them, and commanding, or advising, with divine authority and infallible wisdom, all that it was best for them to do and happiest to desire. Thus, partly as a scholar's exercise and partly as an old man's recreation, the severity of the Latin language was softened, like Venetian crystal, by the variable fire of Hebrew thought, and the 'Book of Books' took the abiding form of which all the future art of the Western nations was to be an hourly expanding interpretation."