"Between 1726 and 1729 he lived in exile mainly in England. There he avoided trouble for three years and wrote in English his first essays, ESSAY UPON EPIC POETRY and ESSAY UPON THE CIVIL WARS IN FRANCE, which were published in 1727." "Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religions, his religiosity was anticlerical. With his brother Armand, who was a fundamentalist Catholic, Voltaire did not get on as well as with his sister. Atheism Voltaire considered not as baleful as fanaticism, but nearly always fatal to virtue. The doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation he dismissed as nonsense. As a humanist, Voltaire advocated religious and social tolerance, but not necessarily in a direct way. Well known is Voltaire's hostility toward the Jews. His play LE FANATISME, OU MAHOMET LE PROPHÈTE (1741), which portrayed the founder of Islam as an intriguer and greedy for power, was denounced by Catholic clergymen. They had no doubts that the true...