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Title: Toleration and other essays

Author: Voltaire

Translator: Joseph McCabe

Release date: March 18, 2021 [eBook #64858]

Language: English

Credits: Turgut Dincer, Susan Carr and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOLERATION AND OTHER ESSAYS ***




                             TOLERATION
                          AND OTHER ESSAYS

                                 BY
                              VOLTAIRE

                TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
                            Joseph McCabe

                         G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
                         NEW YORK AND LONDON
                       The Knickerbocker Press
                                1912




                  The Knickerbocker Press, New York




                            INTRODUCTION


It seems useful, in presenting to English readers this selection of
the works of Voltaire, to recall the position and personality of the
writer and the circumstances in which the works were written. It is
too lightly assumed, even by many who enjoy the freedom which he,
more than any, won for Europe, and who may surpass him in scepticism,
that Voltaire is a figure to be left in a discreetly remote niche
of memory. “Other times, other manners” is one of the phrases he
contributed to modern literature. Let us genially acknowledge that he
played a great part in dispelling the last mists of the Middle Ages,
and politely attribute to the papal perversity and the lingering
vulgarity of his age the more effective features of his work. Thus
has Voltaire become a mere name to modern rationalists; a name of
fading brilliance, a monumental name, but nothing more.

This sentiment is at once the effect and the cause of a very general
ignorance concerning Voltaire; and it is a reproach to us. We
have time, amid increasing knowledge, to recover the most obscure
personalities of the Middle Ages and of antiquity; we trace the
most elementary contributors to modern culture; and we neglect
one of the mightiest forces that made the development of modern
culture possible. I do not speak of Voltaire the historian, who, a
distinguished writer says, introduced history for the first time into
the realm of letters; Voltaire the dramatist, whose name is inscribed
for ever in the temple of the tragic muse; Voltaire the physicist,
who drove the old Cartesianism out of France, and imposed on it the
fertile principles of Newton; Voltaire the social reformer, who
talked to eighteenth-century kings of the rights of man, and scourged
every judicial criminal of his aristocratic age; Voltaire the
cosmopolitan, who boldly set up England’s ensign of liberty in feudal
France. All these things were done by the “flippant Voltaire” of the
flippant modern preacher. But he can be considered here only as one
of the few who, in an age of profound inequality, used the privilege
of his enlightenment to enlighten his fellows; one of those who won
for us that liberty to think rationally, and to speak freely, on
religious matters which we too airily attribute to our new goddess,
Evolution.

The position of Voltaire in the development of religious thought in
Europe is unique. Even if his words had no application in our age,
it merits the most grateful consideration. Trace to its sources the
spirit that has led modern France and modern Portugal to raise civic
ideals above creeds, and that will, within a few decades, find the
same expression in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and half of America. You
find yourself in the first half of the nineteenth century, when, in
all those countries, a few hundred men, and some women, maintained
a superb struggle with restored monarchs and restored Jesuits for
the liberty that had been wrested from them; and you find that the
vast majority of them were disciples of Voltaire. Go back to the very
beginning of the anti-clerical movement; seek the generators of that
intellectual and emotional electricity which, gathering insensibly
in the atmosphere of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth
century, burst at last in the lurid flashes and the rolling thunders
of the Great Revolution. On the religious side, with which alone I
am concerned here, that devastating storm was overwhelmingly due to
the writings of Voltaire. Rousseau, it is true, gave to the world his
simple Deistic creed, and with sweet reasonableness lodged it in the
minds of many; Diderot and d’Holbach and La Mettrie impressed their
deeper scepticism with a weight of learning. But Voltaire was the
oracle of Europe. “I have no sceptre, but I have a pen,” he once said
to Frederick the Great. And when, in his later years, he poured out
from his remote château on the Swiss frontier the flood of satires,
stories, sermons, dialogues, pamphlets, and treatises which ate deep
into the fabric of old Europe, his pen proved mightier than all the
sceptres of its kings. To ignore Voltaire is to ignore history.

My object, however, in introducing to English readers these few
characteristic specimens of his anti-clerical work is not solely to
bespeak some gratefulness for the toleration and freedom which he
enforced on a reluctant world, or to gratify a simple curiosity as
to the character of his power. These are not dead words, not ashes
of an extinct fire, which we disinter; for the world is not dead at
which they were flung. If they cause resentment in the minds of some,
the publication will be the more justified. But before I explain this
paradox, let me show how the works came to be written, and written in
such a way.

The life of Voltaire, which some conceive as a prolonged adolescence,
has a very clear and instructive division into adolescence, manhood,
and ripe age. All the works given in this volume belong to the
last part, but we must glance at the others. François Marie Arouet
was born, in the very comfortable _bourgeois_ family of a staid
Parisian notary, in 1694. He became a precocious, sharp-eared boy.
His godfather was an _abbé_, a kind of ecclesiastic--not usually
a priest--in the France of the time who drew his income from the
Church, and therefore felt more entitled than the ordinary layman
to scoff at its dogmas and ignore its morals. He could plead the
example of his bishops. Several of these _abbés_ visited the
home of the Arouets, and gave little “Zozo” his first lessons in
Biblical criticism. In the great college of the Jesuits he learned
to articulate his scepticism. In his seventeenth year he set out on
the career of letters. The kindly _abbé_, who, having answered to
God for him at the baptismal font, felt bound to guide his fortunes,
introduced him to one of the most brilliant and dissolute circles
in Paris. It was a kind of club of _abbés_, nobles, writers, etc.,
and in it he would rapidly attain that large and peculiar knowledge
of the Old Testament which appears in his writings. He sparkled so
much at the suppers of the Epicureans, and earned such reputation,
that he was put in the Bastille for certain naughty epigrams, which
he had not written; and he was exiled for another epigram, on a
distinguished sinner, which he had written. In the pensive solitude
of the Bastille he changed his name to Voltaire.[1] He emerged bolder
than ever, wrote tragedies and poems and epigrams, was welcomed in
the smartest salons of Paris, and behaved as a young gentleman of the
time was expected to behave, until his thirty-first year.

In 1726 he was, through the despotic and most unjust action of a
powerful noble, again put in the Bastille, and was then allowed to
exchange that fortress for the fogs of London. Up to this time he
had no idea of attacking Church or State. He had, in 1722, written a
letter on religion--in the vein, apparently, of some of Swinburne’s
unpublished juvenilia--which a distinguished writer of the time,
to whom he read it, described as “making his hair stand on end”;
it was, however, not intended for circulation. But experience of
England, for which he contracted a passionate admiration, and which
(as Mr. Churton Collins has shown) he studied profoundly, sobered him
with a high and serious purpose. He met all the brilliant writers
of that age in England, and took a great interest in the religious
controversy which raged over Anthony Collins’s _Discourse_. He
returned to France in 1729, vowing to win for it the liberty and
enlightenment he had enjoyed in England. The splendid _English
Letters_ which he wrote with that aim, and was afraid to publish,
leaked out in 1734. The book was burned by the hangman, and he had to
retire once more, for letting France know how enlightened England was
in the days of George I.

I pass over twenty years of his strenuous and brilliant career. He
wrote his most famous tragedies and histories; he made an ardent
study of, and introduced to France, the new science of Isaac Newton,
whose funeral he had witnessed in London; he was banished from his
country for smiling at Adam and Eve; he deserted France for Germany,
and then quarrelled with Frederick the Great; he tried liberal
Switzerland, and found that it gave you liberty only to attack other
people’s dogmas; and in 1760 he settled at Ferney, since the shrine
of Continental Rationalism, on the frontier, so that he could talk
to Calvinists from the French side, and cross the border, if need
were, to talk to France. But France was at his feet. For eighteen
years more he showered his rain of publications on it. Even in those
illiterate days some of his publications sold 300,000 copies. And
when at last, in 1778, he was tempted to revisit Paris, the roar of
delight, of esteem, of abject worship, overwhelmed him, and he died
in a flood of glory.

To those last twenty years of his life belong the anti-Christian
works reproduced in this volume. He was now a man of mature judgment,
vast erudition, and grave humanitarian purpose. The common notion in
England of Voltaire’s works, as superficial gibes thrown out by the
way in a brilliant career, is sheer nonsense. His command of history
was remarkable; and he had, for the time, a thorough grasp of science
and philosophy. His arguments for the existence of God will compare
with those of the ablest lay or clerical theologians of his time.
His knowledge was defective and inaccurate because all knowledge was
defective and inaccurate in the eighteenth century, when research
was only just beginning to recover from its long ecclesiastical
paralysis. No man in France had a larger command of such knowledge
as the time afforded, and the use he made of it was serious and
high-purposed. It is only the superficial who cannot see the depth
below that sparkling surface; only the insensible who cannot feel the
strong, steady beat of a human heart behind the rippling laughter.

_Écrasez l’infame_--“Crush the infamous thing”--the battle-cry
which he sent over Europe from the Swiss frontier, was but a fiery
expression of his love of men, of liberty, of enlightenment, and of
progress. Read the stories of brutality in the guise of religion that
are told in these pages--stories which ran into Voltaire’s day--the
stories of “religious” processions and relics and superstitions, the
story of how this ignorant credulity had been imposed on Europe, and
how it was maintained by sceptical priests, and say, if you dare,
that the phrase was not a cry of truth, sincerity, and humanity.
There was even a profoundly religious impulse in his work. A clerical
friend once confided to me that he found a use in Voltaire. It
seemed that, when inspiration for the Sunday sermon failed, he fell
upon my “atheistic friends,” Voltaire and Rousseau, and the French
Revolution they brought about. He was amazed to hear that they
believed in God as firmly as, and much more reasonably than, he and
his colleagues did. Voltaire’s aim was a sincere effort to rid pure
religion of its morbid and abominable overgrowths.

Very good, you say; but why not have set about it more politely? For
two plain reasons. First, because the character of his opponents
fully justified him in directing his most scathing wit upon
them. The Jesuits, whom he chiefly lashed, were in his own time
ignominiously expelled by nearly every Catholic Power in Europe, and
were suppressed by the Pope. The other clergy were deeply tainted
with scepticism in the cities, and befogged with dense ignorance in
the provinces. One incident will suffice to justify his disdain.
His latest English biographer, S. G. Tallentyre, who is not biassed
in his favour, says that it is most probable, if not certain, that
while the Catholic authorities were burning his books in Paris, and
shuddering at his infidelity, they were secretly tempting him, with
the prospect of a cardinal’s hat, to join the clergy. It is certain
that they invited him to do religious work, and that, at the height
of his anti-clerical work, he received direct from the Pope certain
relics to put in a chapel he had built for his poor neighbours. Could
a prince of irony restrain himself in such circumstances? The other
reason is the character of the dogmas and practices he assailed. Read
them in the following pages.

It is true that there are passages in Voltaire which none of us
would, if we could, write to-day. The taste of the eighteenth
century, still fouled by the Middle Ages, is not the taste of the
twentieth. Besides some longer passages which have been omitted from
the _Treatise on Toleration_, as will be explained, a few lines
have been struck out or modified here and there in one or two of
the works in this selection. Let me not be misunderstood, however.
They are mainly words of the Old Testament, and comments inspired
only by those words, that have been omitted. In the eighteenth
century one could quote and comment in public on these grossnesses.
Indeed, by some singular mental process, which Voltaire alone could
characterise, the books containing these crudely sexual passages are
still thrust into the hands of children and of confined criminals by
the joint authority of Church and State in England; and grave bishops
and gentle women say that they are the Word of God.

And this brings me to the last point that I desire to touch before
I introduce, one by one, the works contained in this volume. Why
reproduce at all, in the twentieth century, these fitting scourges of
the superstitions of the eighteenth? I have said that they deserve
to be reproduced for their historical interest and for the great
part they have played in the history of Europe; but there is another
reason. I have an idea that, if Voltaire were alive in England
to-day, he would write with more scathing irony than ever. I imagine
him gazing with profound admiration at that marvellous picture of
the past which science and archæology have given us, and then asking
at what date in the nineteenth century we ceased to dispute about
consubstantiality and transubstantiation, took the gilt off our Old
Testament, and elevated our bishops to the rank of citizens. I then
fancy him peeping into the fine schools of London or Manchester, and
learning that the first educational authorities in England still set
children to learn about Adam and Eve, the Deluge, the Plagues of
Egypt, and the remarkable proceedings of Joshua and David and the
rest. I try to conceive him studying the faces of learned judges and
professors, as they listen gravely to the reading of the Bible and
the creeds in church on Sundays, or reverently handle the book in
court. I picture his amazement as he learns that this England, which
he thought so enlightened, still, at the dictation of its bishops,
retains the most abominable divorce law in the civilised world; or
hears preachers and social students seriously expressing concern
for the future of Europe on account of the decay of docility to the
clergy. What would he have written on such a situation?

The satire of Voltaire is not out of place in modern England. As long
as the Bible is, however insincerely, pressed on us as the Word of
God, and retained in our schools, we are compelled to point out in
it features which make such claims ludicrous. As long as the clergy
maintain that their rule in the past was a benefit to civilisation,
and therefore its decay may be a menace to civilisation, we are
bound to tell the ugly truth in regard to the past. As long as
educated men and women among us profess a belief in the magic of
transubstantiation and auricular confession and miracles, and the
uneducated are encouraged to believe these things literally, the
irony of Voltaire is legitimate. Christian bodies have, of late
years, made repeated attempts to induce our leaders of culture to
profess the Christian faith. The issue has been to make it clear that
the great majority of our professors, distinguished writers, and
artists hold either the simple theism of Voltaire or discard even
that. The doctrines attacked here by Voltaire are wholly discredited.
Yet they are still the official teaching of the Churches (except
of the Congregationalists); they are largely enforced on innocent
children, and they are literally accepted by some millions of our
people. I see no reason to refrain from letting the irony of Voltaire
fall on them once more.

The reader must not, however, conclude at once that the following
pages are so many red-hot charges into the tottering ranks of
mediæval dogmas. My aim has been to illustrate the versatility of
Voltaire’s genius, and to exhibit his own sincere creed no less than
his most penetrating scourges of what most educated men in his time
and ours regard as utterly antiquated delusions. There are pages here
that might receive a place of honour in the most orthodox religious
journals of England; other pages in which the irony is so subtle and
the temper so polite that, without the terrible name, they would
puzzle many a clergyman. In the _Questions of Zapata_, however, and
in parts of one or two other essays, I have given specimens of the
Voltaire who was likened to Antichrist.

The selection opens with the _Treatise on Toleration_, which has
a mainly historical interest, and illustrates the finest side
of Voltaire’s work and character. It shows him as a profound
humanitarian, putting aside, in his seventieth year, his laughter and
his comfort to take up the cause of an obscure sufferer, and shaking
France, as Zola did in our time, with his denunciation of a judicial
crime. The story of the crime is told in the essay itself; but it is
not told, or in any way conveyed, that, but for the action of the
aged rationalist, not a single effort would have been made to secure
redress. His splendid action on that and a few similar occasions has
been held by critical students of his career to atone for all his
errors. Many Protestants who scoff at “Voltaire the scoffer” may
learn with surprise that his noble and impassioned struggle earned
for them the right to live in Southern France. The treatise was
published in 1763. I have omitted a number of lengthy and learned
notes and one or two chapters which are incidental to the argument
and of little interest to-day.

The three Homilies--those _On Superstition_, _On the Interpretation
of the Old Testament_, and _On the Interpretation of the New
Testament_--are selected from five which Voltaire wrote in 1767,
with the literary pretence that they had been delivered before some
liberal congregation at London in 1765. The second of these Homilies
is one of the most effective indictments of the Old Testament,
considered as an inspired book. Nowhere in rationalistic literature
is there an exposure of the essential humanity of the Old Testament
so condensed yet so fluent, so original in form, comprehensive
in range, and unanswerable in argument. It was published, it is
believed, in 1767, though the first edition is marked 1766. Its
humour is malicious from the first line, as the “Dr. Tamponet”
whose name is put to it was really an orthodox champion of the
Sorbonne. It is in this short diatribe that I have chiefly made the
modifications of which I have spoken. It was Voltaire’s aim to show
that the coarseness of many passages of the Old Testament is quite
as inconsistent with inspiration as its colossal inaccuracy and its
childlike superstition. An English translation, similarly modified,
of the _Questions of Zapata_ was made by an anonymous lady, and
published by Hetherington, in 1840. In the present translation some
of the paragraphs are omitted, and the numbering is therefore altered.

The _Epistle to the Romans_, another specimen of Voltaire’s most
deadly polemic, is a just and masterly indictment of the papal
system. It was issued in 1768, and very promptly put on the Index by
the outraged Vatican. But it penetrated educated Italy, and had no
small share in the enlightenment which has ended in the emancipation
of the country. The exquisite imitations of sermons which follow
contain some of Voltaire’s most insidious and delicate irony. The
_Sermon of the Fifty_ was written and published in 1762.

The volume closes with the famous poem which Voltaire wrote, in the
year 1755, when he heard that an earthquake had destroyed between
30,000 and 40,000 people in Portugal. It was one of the chief
festivals of the Catholic year, the Feast of All Saints (November 1),
and the crowded churches were in the very act of worship, when the
ground shook. In a few minutes 16,000 men, women, and children were
slain, and as many more perished in the subsequent fires and horrors.
Voltaire was at Geneva, and the horrible news threw him into the
deepest distress. The poem into which he condensed his pain and his
doubts is not a leisurely and polished piece of art. It has technical
defects, and is unequal in inspiration. Should we admire it if it
were otherwise? But it is a fine monument to his sincerity and just
human passion, and it contains some phrases that became proverbial
and some passages of great beauty. I have altered the structure of
the verse--the original is in rhymed hexameters--only in order that
I could more faithfully convey to those who read only English the
sentiments and, as far as possible, the phrasing of Voltaire. One
allusion that recurs throughout needs some explanation. Browning’s
“All’s right with the world” was a very familiar cry in the
eighteenth century. The English Deists, and J. J. Rousseau in France,
held obstinately to this most singular optimism. Although Rousseau
made a feeble and friendly reply to the poem, it proved a deadly blow
to his somewhat fantastic teaching on that point.

Immediately preceding this poem I have given a translation of
Voltaire’s philosophical essay, _Il faut choisir_. This was written
by him in 1772, six years before his death, and is the most succinct
expression of his mature religious views. It is really directed
against his atheistic friends at Paris, such as d’Holbach. Condorcet
said of it that it contained the most powerful argumentation for the
existence of God that had yet been advanced. Its remarkable lucidity
and terseness enable us to identify his views at once. He did not
believe in the spirituality or immortality of the soul, but he had an
unshakable conviction of the existence of God. It is sometimes said
that the Lisbon earthquake shook his theism. This is inaccurate, as
a careful comparison of the two works will show. He never believed
that the supreme intelligence was infinite in power, and the haunting
problem of evil always made him hesitate to ascribe more than
limited moral attributes to his deity. His one unwavering dogma--it
does not waver for an instant in the poem--is that the world was
designed by a supreme intelligence and is moved by a supreme power.
Had he lived one hundred years later, when evolution began to throw
its magical illumination upon the order of the universe and the
wonderful adaptation of its parts, his position would clearly have
been modified. As it was, he, with constant sincerity, avowed that he
could not understand the world without a great architect and a prime
mover of all moving things. In all his works the uglier features of
the world, which, unlike many theists, he steadfastly confronted,
forbid him to add any other and warmer attributes to this bleak
intelligence and mysterious power.

                                                                J. M.

  October, 1911.




                              CONTENTS


                                                                   PAGE

  INTRODUCTION                                                     iii

  IN CONNECTION WITH THE DEATH OF JEAN CALAS                         1

  ON SUPERSTITION                                                   88

  ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT                       102

  ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT                       118

  EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS                                            126

  THE SERMON OF THE FIFTY                                          160

  THE QUESTIONS OF ZAPATA                                          183

  WE MUST TAKE SIDES; OR, THE PRINCIPAL OF ACTION                  206

  POEM ON THE LISBON DISASTER                                      255




                            On Toleration

                   In Connection with the Death of
                             Jean Calas


              SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH OF JEAN CALAS

The murder of Calas, which was perpetrated with the sword of justice
at Toulouse on March 9, 1762, is one of the most singular events that
deserve the attention of our own and of later ages. We quickly forget
the long list of the dead who have perished in our battles. It is the
inevitable fate of war; those who die by the sword might themselves
have inflicted death on their enemies, and did not die without the
means of defending themselves. When the risk and the advantage are
equal astonishment ceases, and even pity is enfeebled. But when
an innocent father is given into the hands of error, of passion,
or of fanaticism; when the accused has no defence but his virtue;
when those who dispose of his life run no risk but that of making a
mistake; when they can slay with impunity by a legal decree--then the
voice of the general public is heard, and each fears for himself.
They see that no man’s life is safe before a court that has been set
up to guard the welfare of citizens, and every voice is raised in a
demand of vengeance.

In this strange incident we have to deal with religion, suicide,
and parricide. The question was, Whether a father and mother had
strangled their son to please God, a brother had strangled his
brother, and a friend had strangled his friend; or whether the judges
had incurred the reproach of breaking on the wheel an innocent
father, or of sparing a guilty mother, brother, and friend.

Jean Calas, a man of sixty-eight years, had been engaged in commerce
at Toulouse for more than forty years, and was recognised by all who
knew him as a good father. He was a Protestant, as were also his wife
and family, except one son, who had abjured the heresy, and was in
receipt of a small allowance from his father. He seemed to be so far
removed from the absurd fanaticism that breaks the bonds of society
that he had approved the conversion of his son [Louis Calas], and had
had in his service for thirty years a zealous Catholic woman, who had
reared all his children.

One of the sons of Jean Calas, named Marc Antoine, was a man of
letters. He was regarded as of a restless, sombre, and violent
character. This young man, failing to enter the commercial world,
for which he was unfitted, or the legal world, because he could
not obtain the necessary certificate that he was a Catholic,
determined to end his life, and informed a friend of his intention.
He strengthened his resolution by reading all that has ever been
written on suicide.

Having one day lost his money in gambling, he determined to carry
out his plan on that very day. A personal friend and friend of the
family, named Lavaisse, a young man of nineteen, well known for
his candid and kindly ways, the son of a distinguished lawyer at
Toulouse, had come from Bordeaux on the previous day, October 12,
1761. He happened to sup with the Calas family. The father, mother,
Marc Antoine, the elder son, and Pierre, the second son, were
present. After supper they withdrew to a small room. Marc Antoine
disappeared, and when young Lavaisse was ready to go, and he and
Pierre Calas had gone down-stairs, they found, near the shop below,
Marc Antoine in his shirt, hanging from a door, his coat folded under
the counter. His shirt was unruffled, his hair was neatly combed, and
he had no wound or mark on the body.

We will omit the details which were given in court, and the grief and
despair of his parents; their cries were heard by the neighbours.
Lavaisse and Pierre, beside themselves, ran for surgeons and the
police.

While they were doing this, and the father and mother sobbed and
wept, the people of Toulouse gathered round the house. They are
superstitious and impulsive people; they regard as monsters their
brothers who do not share their religion. It was at Toulouse that
solemn thanks were offered to God for the death of Henry III.,
and that an oath was taken to kill any man who should propose to
recognise the great and good Henry IV. This city still celebrates
every year, by a procession and fireworks, the day on which it
massacred four thousand heretical citizens two hundred years ago. Six
decrees of the Council have been passed in vain for the suppression
of this odious festival; the people of Toulouse celebrate it still
like a floral festival.[2]

Some fanatic in the crowd cried out that Jean Calas had hanged his
son Marc Antoine. The cry was soon repeated on all sides; some
adding that the deceased was to have abjured Protestantism on the
following day, and that the family and young Lavaisse had strangled
him out of hatred of the Catholic religion. In a moment all doubt
had disappeared. The whole town was persuaded that it is a point of
religion with the Protestants for a father and mother to kill their
children when they wish to change their faith.

The agitation could not end here. It was imagined that the
Protestants of Languedoc had held a meeting the night before; that
they had, by a majority of votes, chosen an executioner for the
sect; that the choice had fallen on young Lavaisse; and that, in the
space of twenty-four hours, the young man had received the news of
his appointment, and had come from Bordeaux to help Jean Calas, his
wife, and their son Pierre to strangle a friend, son, and brother.

The captain of Toulouse, David, excited by these rumours and wishing
to give effect to them by a prompt execution, took a step which
is against the laws and regulations. He put the Calas family, the
Catholic servant, and Lavaisse in irons.

A report not less vicious than his procedure was published. He even
went further. Marc Antoine Calas had died a Calvinist; and, if he had
taken his own life, his body was supposed to be dragged on a hurdle.
Instead of this, he was buried with great pomp in the church of St.
Stephen, although the priest protested against this profanation.

There are in Languedoc four confraternities of penitents--the
white, the blue, the grey, and the black. Their members wear a long
hood, with a cloth mask, pierced with two holes for the eyes. They
endeavoured to induce the Duke of Fitz-James, the governor of the
province, to enter their ranks, but he refused. The white penitents
held a solemn service over Marc Antoine Calas, as over a martyr.
No church ever celebrated the feast of a martyr with more pomp;
but it was a terrible pomp. They had raised above a magnificent
bier a skeleton, which was made to move its bones. It represented
Marc Antoine Calas holding a palm in one hand, and in the other the
pen with which he was to sign his abjuration of heresy. This pen,
in-point of fact, signed the death-sentence of his father.

The only thing that remained for the poor devil who had taken his
life was canonisation. Everybody regarded him as a saint; some
invoked him, others went to pray at his tomb, others sought miracles
of him, and others, again, related the miracles he had wrought. A
monk extracted some of his teeth, to have permanent relics of him.
A pious woman, who was rather deaf, told how she heard the sound of
bells. An apoplectic priest was cured, after taking an emetic. Legal
declarations of these prodigies were drawn up. The writer of this
account has in his possession the attestation that a young man of
Toulouse went mad because he had prayed for several nights at the
tomb of the new saint, and could not obtain the miracle he sought.

Some of the magistrates belonged to the confraternity of white
penitents. From that moment the death of Jean Calas seemed inevitable.

What contributed most to his fate was the approach of that singular
festival which the people of Toulouse hold every year in memory
of the massacre of four thousand Huguenots. The year 1762 was the
bicentenary of the event. The city was decorated with all the
trappings of the ceremony, and the heated imagination of the people
was still further excited. It was stated publicly that the scaffold
on which the Calas were to be executed would be the chief ornament
of the festival; it was said that Providence itself provided these
victims for sacrifice in honour of our holy religion. A score of
people heard these, and even more violent things. And this in our
days--in an age when philosophy has made so much progress, and a
hundred academies are writing for the improvement of our morals! It
would seem that fanaticism is angry at the success of reason, and
combats it more furiously.

Thirteen judges met daily to bring the trial to a close. There was
not, and could not be, any evidence against the family; but a deluded
religion took the place of proof. Six of the judges long persisted
in condemning Jean Calas, his son, and Lavaisse to the wheel, and
the wife of Jean Calas to the stake. The other seven, more moderate,
wished at least to make an inquiry. The discussions were long and
frequent. One of the judges, convinced that the accused were innocent
and the crime was impossible, spoke strongly on their behalf. He
opposed a zeal for humanity to the zeal for severity, and became the
public pleader for the Calas in Toulouse, where the incessant cries
of outraged religion demanded the blood of the accused. Another
judge, known for his violent temper, spoke against the Calas with the
same spirit. At last, amid great excitement, they both threw up the
case and retired to the country.

But by a singular misfortune the judge who was favourable to the
Calas had the delicacy to persist in his resignation, and the other
returned to condemn those whom he could not judge. His voice it was
that drew up the condemnation to the wheel. There were now eight
votes to five, as one of the six opposing judges had passed to the
more severe party after considerable discussion.

It seems that in a case of parricide, when a father is to be
condemned to the most frightful death, the verdict ought to be
unanimous, as the evidence for so rare a crime ought to be such as
to convince everybody.[3] The slightest doubt in such a case should
intimidate a judge who is to sign the death-sentence. The weakness of
our reason and its inadequacy are shown daily; and what greater proof
of it can we have than when we find a citizen condemned to the wheel
by a majority of one vote? In ancient Athens there had to be fifty
votes above the half to secure a sentence of death. It shows us, most
unprofitably, that the Greeks were wiser and more humane than we.

It seemed impossible that Jean Calas, an old man of sixty-eight
years, whose limbs had long been swollen and weak, had been able
to strangle and hang a young man in his twenty-eighth year, above
the average in strength. It seemed certain that he must have been
assisted in the murder by his wife, his son Pierre, Lavaisse, and
the servant. They had not left each other’s company for an instant
on the evening of the fatal event. But this supposition was just
as absurd as the other. How could a zealous Catholic servant allow
Huguenots to kill a young man, reared by herself, to punish him for
embracing her own religion? How could Lavaisse have come expressly
from Bordeaux to strangle his friend, whose conversion was unknown to
him? How could a tender mother lay hands on her son? How could the
whole of them together strangle a young man who was stronger than all
of them without a long and violent struggle, without cries that would
have aroused the neighbours, without repeated blows and torn garments?

It was evident that, if there had been any crime, all the accused
were equally guilty, as they had never left each other for a moment;
it was evident that they were not all guilty; and it was evident that
the father alone could not have done it. Nevertheless, the father
alone was condemned to the wheel.

The reason of the sentence was as inconceivable as all the rest. The
judges, who were bent on executing Jean Calas, persuaded the others
that the weak old man could not endure the torture, and would on the
scaffold confess his crime and accuse his accomplices. They were
confounded when the old man, expiring on the wheel, prayed God to
witness his innocence, and begged him to pardon his judges.

They were compelled to pass a second sentence in contradiction of
the first, and to set free the mother, the son Pierre, the young
Lavaisse, and the servant; but one of the councillors pointing
out that this verdict gave the lie to the other, that they were
condemning themselves, and that, as the accused were all together
at the supposed hour of the crime, the acquittal of the survivors
necessarily proved the innocence of the dead father, they decided to
banish Pierre Calas. This banishment seemed as illogical and absurd
as all the rest. Pierre Calas was either guilty or innocent. If he
was guilty, he should be broken on the wheel like his father; if he
was innocent, they had no right to banish him. However, the judges,
terrified by the execution of the father and the touching piety of
his end, thought they were saving their honour by affecting to pardon
the son, as if it were not a fresh prevarication to pardon him; and
they thought that the banishment of this poor and helpless young man
was not a great injustice after that they had already committed.

They began with threatening Pierre Calas, in his dungeon, that he
would suffer like his father if he did not renounce his religion. The
young man attests this on oath: “A Dominican monk came to my cell and
threatened me with the same kind of death if I did not give up my
religion.”

Pierre Calas, on leaving the city, met a priest, who compelled him
to return to Toulouse. They confined him in a Dominican convent, and
forced him to perform Catholic functions. It was part of what they
wanted. It was the price of his father’s blood, and religion seemed
to be avenged.

The daughters were taken from the mother and put in a convent. The
mother, almost sprinkled with the blood of her husband, her eldest
son dead, the younger banished, deprived of her daughters and all her
property, was alone in the world, without bread, without hope, dying
of the intolerable misery. Certain persons, having carefully examined
the circumstances of this horrible adventure, were so impressed
that they urged the widow, who had retired into solitude, to go and
demand justice at the feet of the throne.[4] At the time she shrank
from publicity; moreover, being English by birth, and having been
transplanted into a French province in early youth, the name of Paris
terrified her. She imagined that the capital of the kingdom would be
still more barbaric than the capital of Languedoc. At length the duty
of clearing the memory of her husband prevailed over her weakness.
She reached Paris almost at the point of death. She was astonished at
her reception, at the help and the tears that were given to her.[5]

At Paris reason dominates fanaticism, however powerful it be; in the
provinces fanaticism almost always overcomes reason.

M. de Beaumont, the famous advocate of the Parlement de Paris,
undertook to defend her, and drew up a memorial signed by fifteen
other advocates. M. Loiseau, not less eloquent, drew up a memoir on
behalf of the family. M. Mariette, an advocate of the Council, drew
up a judicial inquiry which brought conviction to every mind. These
three generous defenders of the laws of innocence gave to the widow
the profit on the sale of their memoirs. Paris and the whole of
Europe were moved with pity, and demanded justice for the unfortunate
woman. The verdict was given by the public long before it was signed
by the Council.

The spirit of pity penetrated the ministry, in spite of the torrent
of business that so often shuts out pity, and in spite of that
daily sight of misery that does even more to harden the heart. The
daughters were restored to their mother. As they sat, clothed in
crape and bathed in tears, their judges were seen to weep.

They had still enemies, however, for it was a question of religion.
Many of those people who are known in France as “devout”[6] said
openly that it was much better to let an innocent old Calvinist be
slain than to compel eight Councillors of Languedoc to admit that
they were wrong. One even heard such phrases as “There are more
magistrates than Calas”; and it was inferred that the Calas family
ought to be sacrificed to the honour of the magistrates. They did not
reflect that the honour of judges, like that of other men, consists
in repairing their blunders. It is not believed in France that the
Pope is infallible, even with the assistance of his cardinals[7];
we might just as well admit that eight judges of Toulouse are not.
All other people, more reasonable and disinterested, said that the
Toulouse verdict would be reversed all over Europe, even if special
considerations prevented it from being reversed by the Council.

Such was the position of this astonishing adventure when it moved
certain impartial and reasonable persons to submit to the public a
few reflections on the subject of toleration, indulgence, and pity,
which the Abbé Houteville calls “a monstrous dogma,” in his garbled
version of the facts, and which reason calls an “appanage of nature.”

Either the judges of Toulouse, swept away by the fanaticism of
the people, have broken on the wheel an innocent man, which is
unprecedented; or the father and his wife strangled their elder son,
with the assistance of another son and a friend, which is unnatural.
In either case the abuse of religion has led to a great crime. It is,
therefore, of interest to the race to inquire whether religion ought
to be charitable or barbaric.


             CONSEQUENCES OF THE EXECUTION OF JEAN CALAS

If the white penitents were the cause of the execution of an innocent
man, the utter ruin of a family, and the dispersal and humiliation
that attach to an execution, though they should punish only
injustice; if the haste of the white penitents to commemorate as a
saint one who, according to our barbaric customs, should have been
dragged on a hurdle, led to the execution of a virtuous parent; they
ought indeed to be penitents for the rest of their lives. They and
the judges should weep, but not in a long white robe, and with no
mask to hide their tears.

We respect all confraternities; they are edifying. But can whatever
good they may do the State outweigh this appalling evil that they
have done? It seems that they have been established by the zeal
which in Languedoc fires the Catholics against those whom we call
Huguenots. One would say that they had taken vows to hate their
brothers; for we have religion enough left to hate and to persecute,
and we have enough to love and to help. What would happen if these
confraternities were controlled by enthusiasts, as were once certain
congregations of artisans and “gentlemen,” among whom, as one of our
most eloquent and learned magistrates said, the seeing of visions was
reduced to a fine art? What would happen if these confraternities set
up again those dark chambers, called “meditation rooms,” on which
were painted devils armed with horns and claws, gulfs of flame,
crosses and daggers, with the holy name of Jesus surmounting the
picture?[8] What a spectacle for eyes that are already fascinated,
and imaginations that are as inflamed as they are submissive to their
confessors!

There have been times when, as we know only too well,
confraternities were dangerous. The Fratelli and the Flagellants gave
trouble enough. The League[9] began with associations of that kind.
Why should they distinguish themselves thus from other citizens? Did
they think themselves more perfect? The very claim is an insult to
the rest of the nation. Did they wish all Christians to enter their
confraternity? What a sight it would be to have all Europe in hoods
and masks, with two little round holes in front of the eyes! Do they
seriously think that God prefers this costume to that of ordinary
folk? Further, this garment is the uniform of controversialists,
warning their opponents to get to arms. It may excite a kind of civil
war of minds, and would perhaps end in fatal excesses, unless the
king and his ministers were as wise as the fanatics were demented.

We know well what the price has been ever since Christians began to
dispute about dogmas. Blood has flowed, on scaffolds and in battles,
from the fourth century to our own days.[10] We will restrict
ourselves here to the wars and horrors which the Reformation struggle
caused, and see what was the source of them in France. Possibly a
short and faithful account of those calamities will open the eyes of
the uninformed and touch the hearts of the humane.


                     THE IDEA OF THE REFORMATION

When enlightenment spread, with the renaissance of letters in the
fifteenth century, there was a very general complaint of abuses, and
everybody agrees that the complaint was just.

Pope Alexander VI. had openly bought the papal tiara, and his five
bastards shared its advantages. His son, the cardinal-duke of Borgia,
made an end, in concert with his father, of Vitelli, Urbino, Gravina,
Oliveretto, and a hundred other nobles, in order to seize their
lands. Julius II., animated by the same spirit, excommunicated Louis
XII. and gave his kingdom to the first occupant; while he himself,
helmet on head and cuirass on back, spread blood and fire over part
of Italy. Leo X., to pay for his pleasures, sold indulgences, as the
taxes are sold in the open market. They who revolted against this
brigandage were, at least, not wrong from the moral point of view.
Let us see if they were wrong in politics.

They said that, since Jesus Christ had never exacted fees, nor sold
dispensations for this world or indulgences for the next, one might
refuse to pay a foreign prince the price of these things. Supposing
that our fees to Rome and the dispensations which we still buy[11]
did not cost us more than five hundred thousand francs a year, it is
clear that, since the time of Francis I., we should have paid, in
two hundred and fifty years, a hundred and twenty million francs;
allowing for the change of value in money, we may say about two
hundred and fifty millions [£10,000,000]. One may, therefore,
without blasphemy, admit that the heretics, in proposing to abolish
these singular taxes, which will astonish a later age, did not do
a very grave wrong to the kingdom, and that they were rather good
financiers than bad subjects. Let us add that they alone knew Greek,
and were acquainted with antiquity. Let us grant that, in spite of
their errors, we owe to them the development of the human mind, so
long buried in the densest barbarism.

But, as they denied the existence of Purgatory, which it is not
permitted to doubt, and which brought a considerable income to
the monks; and as they did not venerate relics, which ought to be
venerated, and which are a source of even greater profit--in fine,
as they assailed much-respected dogmas, the only answer to them
at first was to burn them. The king, who protected and subsidised
them in Germany, walked at the head of a procession in Paris, and
at the close a number of the wretches were executed. This was the
manner of execution. They were hung at the end of a long beam, which
was balanced, like a see-saw, across a tree. A big fire was lit
underneath, and they were alternately sunk into it and raised out.
Their torments were thus protracted, until death relieved them from a
more hideous punishment than any barbarian had ever invented.

Shortly before the death of Francis I. certain members of the
Parlement de Provence, instigated by their clergy against the
inhabitants of Merindol and Cabrières, asked the king for troops
to support the execution of nineteen persons of the district whom
they had condemned. They had six thousand slain, without regard to
sex or age or infancy, and they reduced thirty towns to ashes. These
people, who had not hitherto been heard of, were, no doubt, in the
wrong to have been born Waldensians; but that was their only crime.
They had been settled for three hundred years in the deserts and on
the mountains, which they had, with incredible labour, made fertile.
Their quiet, pastoral life represented the supposed innocence of the
first ages of men. They knew the neighbouring towns only by selling
fruit to them. They had no law-courts and never warred; they did
not defend themselves. They were slain as one slays animals in an
enclosure.

After the death of Francis I.--a prince who is better known for his
amours and misfortunes than his cruelty--the execution of a thousand
heretics, especially of the Councillor of the Parlement, Dubourg, and
the massacre of Vassy, caused the persecuted sect to take to arms.
They had increased in the light of the flames and under the sword of
the executioner, and substituted fury for patience. They imitated
the cruelties of their enemies. Nine civil wars filled France with
carnage; and a peace more fatal than war led to the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, which is without precedent in the annals of crime.

The [Catholic] League assassinated Henry III. and Henry IV. by the
hands of a Dominican monk, and of a monster who had belonged to
the order of St. Bernard. There are those who say that humanity,
indulgence, and liberty of conscience are horrible things. Candidly,
could they have brought about calamities such as these?


             WHETHER TOLERATION IS DANGEROUS, AND AMONG
                      WHAT PEOPLES IT IS FOUND

There are some who say that, if we treated with paternal indulgence
those erring brethren who pray to God in bad French [instead of bad
Latin], we should be putting weapons in their hands, and would once
more witness the battles of Jarnac, Moncontour, Coutras, Dreux, and
St. Denis. I do not know anything about this, as I am not a prophet;
but it seems to me an illogical piece of reasoning to say: “These men
rebelled when I treated them ill, therefore they will rebel when I
treat them well.”

I would venture to take the liberty to invite those who are at
the head of the government, and those who are destined for high
positions, to reflect carefully whether one really has ground to fear
that kindness will lead to the same revolts as cruelty; whether what
happened in certain circumstances is sure to happen in different
circumstances; if the times, public opinion, and morals are unchanged.

The Huguenots, it is true, have been as inebriated with fanaticism
and stained with blood as we. But are this generation as barbaric as
their fathers? Have not time, the progress of reason, good books, and
the humanising influence of society had an effect on the leaders of
these people? And do we not perceive that the aspect of nearly the
whole of Europe has been changed within the last fifty years?

Government is stronger everywhere, and morals have improved. The
ordinary police, supported by numerous standing armies, gives us some
security against a return to that age of anarchy in which Calvinistic
peasants fought Catholic peasants, hastily enrolled between the
sowing and the harvest.

Different times have different needs. It would be absurd to
decimate the Sorbonne to-day because it once presented a demand for
the burning of the Maid of Orleans, declared that Henry III. had
forfeited his kingdom, excommunicated him, and proscribed the great
Henry IV. We will not think of inquiring into the other bodies in the
kingdom who committed the same excesses in those frenzied days. It
would not only be unjust, but would be as stupid as to purge all the
inhabitants of Marseilles because they had the plague in 1720.

Shall we go and sack Rome, as the troops of Charles V. did, because
Sixtus V. in 1585 granted an indulgence of nine years to all
Frenchmen who would take up arms against their sovereign? Is it not
enough to prevent Rome for ever from reverting to such excesses?

The rage that is inspired by the dogmatic spirit and the abuse of
the Christian religion, wrongly conceived, has shed as much blood
and led to as many disasters in Germany, England, and even Holland,
as in France. Yet religious difference causes no trouble to-day in
those States. The Jew, the Catholic, the Greek, the Lutheran, the
Calvinist, the Anabaptist, the Socinian, the Memnonist, the Moravian,
and so many others, live like brothers in these countries, and
contribute alike to the good of the social body.

They fear no longer in Holland that disputes about predestination
will end in heads being cut off. They fear no longer at London that
the quarrels of Presbyterians and Episcopalians about liturgies
and surplices will lead to the death of a king on the scaffold.
A populous and wealthier Ireland will no longer see its Catholic
citizens sacrifice its Protestant citizens to God during two months,
bury them alive, hang their mothers to gibbets, tie the girls to
the necks of their mothers, and see them expire together; or put
swords in the hands of their prisoners and guide their hands to
the bosoms of their wives, their fathers, their mothers, and their
daughters, thinking to make parricides of them, and damn them as
well as exterminate them.[12] Such is the account given by Rapin
Thoyras, an officer in Ireland, and almost a contemporary; so we
find in all the annals and histories of England. It will never be
repeated. Philosophy, the sister of religion, has disarmed the hands
that superstition had so long stained with blood; and the human mind,
awakening from its intoxication, is amazed at the excesses into which
fanaticism had led it.

We have in France a rich province in which the Lutherans outnumber
the Catholics. The University of Alsace is in the hands of the
Lutherans. They occupy some of the municipal offices; yet not the
least religious quarrel has disturbed this province since it came
into the possession of our kings. Why? Because no one has ever been
persecuted in it. Seek not to vex the hearts of men, and they are
yours.

I do not say that all who are not of the same religion as the prince
should share the positions and honours of those who follow the
dominant religion. In England the Catholics, who are regarded as
attached to the party of the Pretender, are not admitted to office.
They even pay double taxes. In other respects, however, they have all
the rights of citizens.

Some of the French bishops have been suspected of holding that it
redounds neither to their honour nor their profit to have Calvinists
in their dioceses. This is said to be one of the greatest obstacles
to toleration. I cannot believe it. The episcopal body in France
is composed of gentlemen, who think and act with the nobility that
befits their birth. They are charitable and generous; so much justice
must be done them. They must think that their fugitive subjects
will assuredly not be converted in foreign countries, and that,
when they return to their pastors, they may be enlightened by their
instructions and touched by their example. There would be honour in
converting them, and their material interests would not suffer. The
more citizens there were, the larger would be the income from the
prelate’s estates.

A Polish bishop had an Anabaptist for farmer and a Socinian for
steward. It was suggested that he ought to discharge and prosecute
the latter because he did not believe in consubstantiality, and the
former because he did not baptise his child until it was fifteen
years old. He replied that they would be damned for ever in the next
world, but that they were very useful to him in this.

Let us get out of our grooves and study the rest of the globe. The
Sultan governs in peace twenty million people of different religions;
two hundred thousand Greeks live in security at Constantinople;
the _muphti_ himself nominates and presents to the emperor the
Greek patriarch, and they also admit a Latin patriarch. The Sultan
nominates Latin bishops for some of the Greek islands, using the
following formula: “I command him to go and reside as bishop in
the island of Chios, according to their ancient usage and their
vain ceremonies.” The empire is full of Jacobites, Nestorians, and
Monothelites; it contains Copts, Christians of St. John, Jews, and
Hindoos. The annals of Turkey do not record any revolt instigated by
any of these religions.

Go to India, Persia, or Tartary, and you will find the same
toleration and tranquillity. Peter the Great patronised all the cults
in his vast empire. Commerce and agriculture profited by it, and the
body politic never suffered from it.

The government of China has not, during the four thousand years of
its known history, had any cult but the simple worship of one God.
Nevertheless, it tolerates the superstitions of Fo, and permits a
large number of bronzes, who would be dangerous if the prudence of
the courts did not restrain them.

It is true that the great Emperor Yang-Chin, perhaps the wisest and
most magnanimous emperor that China ever had, expelled the Jesuits.
But it was not because he was intolerant; it was because the Jesuits
were. They themselves give, in their curious letters, the words of
the good prince to them: “I know that your religion is intolerant; I
know what you have done in Manila and Japan. You deceived my father;
think not to deceive me.” If you read the whole of his speech to
them, you will see that he was one of the wisest and most clement of
men. How could he retain European physicians who, under pretence of
showing thermometers and æolipiles at court, had carried off a prince
of the blood? What would he have said if he had read our history and
was acquainted with the days of our League and of the Gunpowder Plot?

It was enough for him to be informed of the indecent quarrels of the
Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and secular priests sent into his
State from the ends of the earth. They came to preach the truth,
and fell to anathematising each other. Hence the emperor was bound
to expel the foreign disturbers. But how kindly he dismissed them!
What paternal care did he not devote to their journey, and in order
to protect them from insult on the way? Their very banishment was a
lesson in toleration and humanity.

The Japanese were the most tolerant of all men. A dozen peaceful
religions throve in their empire, when the Jesuits came with a
thirteenth. As they soon showed that they would tolerate no other,
there arose a civil war, even more frightful than that of the League,
and the land was desolated. In the end the Christian religion was
drowned in blood; the Japanese closed their empire, and regarded
us only as wild beasts, like those which the English have cleared
out of their island. The minister Colbert, knowing how we need the
Japanese, who have no need of us, tried in vain to reopen commerce
with their empire. He found them inflexible.

Thus the whole of our continent shows us that we must neither preach
nor practise intolerance.

Turn your eyes to the other hemisphere. Study Carolina, of which the
wise Locke was the legislator. Seven fathers of families sufficed to
set up a public cult approved by the law; and this liberty gave rise
to no disorder. Heaven preserve us from quoting this as an example
for France to follow! We quote it only to show that the greatest
excess of toleration was not followed by the slightest dissension.
But what is good and useful in a young colony is not suitable for a
long-established kingdom.

What shall we say of the primitive people who have been derisively
called Quakers, but who, however ridiculous their customs may be,
have been so virtuous and given so useful a lesson of peace to other
men? There are a hundred thousand of them in Pennsylvania. Discord
and controversy are unknown in the happy country they have made for
themselves; and the very name of their chief town, Philadelphia,
which unceasingly reminds them that all men are brothers, is an
example and a shame to nations that are yet ignorant of toleration.

Toleration, in fine, never led to civil war; intolerance has covered
the earth with carnage. Choose, then, between these rivals--between
the mother who would have her son slain and the mother who yields,
provided his life be spared.

I speak here only of the interest of nations. While respecting
theology, as I do, I regard in this article only the physical and
moral well-being of society. I beg every impartial reader to weigh
these truths, verify them, and add to them. Attentive readers, who
restrain not their thoughts, always go farther than the author.


                   HOW TOLERATION MAY BE ADMITTED

I venture to think that some enlightened and magnanimous minister,
some humane and wise prelate, some prince who puts his interest in
the number of his subjects and his glory in their welfare, may deign
to glance at this inartistic and defective paper. He will supply
its defects and say to himself: What do I risk in seeing my land
cultivated and enriched by a larger number of industrious workers,
the revenue increased, the State more flourishing?

Germany would be a desert strewn with the bones of Catholics,
Protestants, and Anabaptists, slain by each other, if the peace of
Westphalia had not at length brought freedom of conscience.

We have Jews at Bordeaux and Metz and in Alsace; we have Lutherans,
Molinists, and Jansenists; can we not suffer and control Calvinists
on much the same terms as those on which Catholics are tolerated
at London? The more sects there are, the less danger in each.
Multiplicity enfeebles them. They are all restrained by just laws
which forbid disorderly meetings, insults, and sedition, and are ever
enforced by the community.

We know that many fathers of families, who have made large fortunes
in foreign lands, are ready to return to their country. They ask
only the protection of natural law, the validity of their marriages,
security as to the condition of their children, the right to inherit
from their fathers, and the enfranchisement of their persons. They
ask not for public chapels, or the right to municipal offices and
dignities. Catholics have not these things in England and other
countries. It is not a question of giving immense privileges and
secure positions to a faction, but of allowing a peaceful people to
live, and of moderating the laws once, but no longer, necessary. It
is not our place to tell the ministry what is to be done; we do but
ask consideration for the unfortunate.

How many ways there are of making them useful, and preventing them
from ever being dangerous! The prudence of the ministry and the
Council, supported as it is by force, will easily discover these
means, which are already happily employed by other nations.

There are still fanatics among the Calvinistic populace; but it is
certain that there are far more among the convulsionary [bigoted
Catholic] populace. The dregs of the fanatical worshippers of St.
Médard count as nothing in the nation; the dregs of the Calvinistic
prophets are annihilated. The great means to reduce the number of
fanatics, if any remain, is to submit that disease of the mind to
the treatment of reason, which slowly, but infallibly, enlightens
men. Reason is gentle and humane. It inspires liberality, suppresses
discord, and strengthens virtue; it has more power to make obedience
to the laws attractive than force has to compel it. And shall we take
no account of the ridicule that attaches to-day to the enthusiasm of
these good people? Ridicule is a strong barrier to the extravagance
of all sectarians. The past is as if it had never been. We must
always start from the present--from the point which nations have
already reached.

There was a time when it was thought necessary to issue decrees
against those who taught a doctrine at variance with the categories
of Aristotle, the abhorrence of a vacuum, the quiddities, the
universal apart from the object. We have in Europe more than
a hundred volumes of jurisprudence on sorcery and the way to
distinguish between false and real sorcerers. The excommunication of
grasshoppers and harmful insects has been much practised, and still
survives in certain rituals. But the practice is over; Aristotle and
the sorcerers and grasshoppers are left in peace. There are countless
instances of this folly, once thought so important. Other follies
arise from time to time; but they have their day and are abandoned.
What would happen to-day if a man were minded to call himself a
Carpocratian, a Eutychian, a Monothelite, a Monophysist, a Nestorian,
or a Manichæan? We should laugh at him, as at a man dressed in the
garb of former days.

The nation was beginning to open its eyes when the Jesuits Le Tellier
and Doucin fabricated the bull _Unigenitus_ and sent it to Rome. They
thought that they still lived in those ignorant times when the most
absurd statements were accepted without inquiry. They ventured even
to condemn the proposition, a truth of all times and all places: “The
fear of unjust excommunication should not prevent one from doing
one’s duty.” It was a proscription of reason, of the liberties of
the Gallican Church, and of the fundamental principle of morals. It
was to say to men: God commands you never to do your duty if you
fear injustice. Never was common-sense more outrageously challenged!
The counsellors of Rome were not on their guard. The papal court was
persuaded that the bull was necessary, and that the nation desired
it; it was signed, sealed, and dispatched. You know the results;
assuredly, if they had been foreseen, the bull would have been
modified. There were angry quarrels, which the prudence and goodness
of the king have settled.

So it is in regard to a number of the points which divide the
Protestants and ourselves. Some are of no consequence; some are more
serious; but on these points the fury of the controversy has so far
abated that the Protestants themselves no longer enter into disputes
in their churches.

It is a time of disgust, of satiety, or, rather, of reason, that may
be used as an epoch and guarantee of public tranquillity. Controversy
is an epidemic disease that nears its end, and what is now needed
is gentle treatment. It is to the interest of the State that its
expatriated children should return modestly to the homes of their
fathers. Humanity demands it, reason counsels it, and politics need
not fear it.


                WHETHER INTOLERANCE IS OF NATURAL AND
                              HUMAN LAW

Natural law is that indicated to men by nature. You have reared a
child; he owes you respect as a father, gratitude as a benefactor.
You have a right to the products of the soil that you have cultivated
with your own hands. You have given or received a promise; it must be
kept.

Human law must in every case be based on natural law. All over the
earth the great principle of both is: Do not unto others what you
would that they do not unto you. Now, in virtue of this principle,
one man cannot say to another: “Believe what I believe, and what
thou canst not believe, or thou shalt perish.” Thus do men speak
in Portugal, Spain, and Goa. In some other countries they are now
content to say: “Believe, or I detest thee; believe, or I will do
thee all the harm I can. Monster, thou sharest not my religion, and
therefore hast no religion; thou shalt be a thing of horror to thy
neighbours, thy city, and thy province.”

If it were a point of human law to behave thus, the Japanese should
detest the Chinese, who should abhor the Siamese; the Siamese, in
turn, should persecute the Thibetans, who should fall upon the
Hindoos. A Mogul should tear out the heart of the first Malabarian he
met; the Malabarian should slay the Persian, who might massacre the
Turk; and all of them should fling themselves against the Christians,
who have so long devoured each other.

The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the
right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in
order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.


             WHETHER INTOLERANCE WAS KNOWN TO THE GREEKS

The peoples of whom history has given us some slight knowledge
regarded their different religions as links that bound them together;
it was an association of the human race. There was a kind of right
to hospitality among the gods, just as there was among men. When a
stranger reached a town, his first act was to worship the gods of
the country; even the gods of enemies were strictly venerated. The
Trojans offered prayers to the gods who fought for the Greeks.

Alexander, in the deserts of Libya, went to consult the god Ammon,
whom the Greeks called Zeus and the Latins Jupiter, though they both
had their own Zeus or Jupiter at home. When a town was besieged,
sacrifices and prayers were offered to the gods of the town to secure
their favour. Thus in the very midst of war religion united men and
moderated their fury, though at times it enjoined on them inhuman and
horrible deeds.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that not one of the ancient
civilised nations restricted the freedom of thought.[13] Each of them
had a religion, but it seems to me that they used it in regard to men
as they did in regard to their gods. All of them recognised a supreme
God, but they associated with him a prodigious number of lesser
divinities. They had only one cult, but they permitted numbers of
special systems.

The Greeks, for instance, however religious they were, allowed the
Epicureans to deny providence and the existence of the soul. I need
not speak of the other sects which all offended against the sound
idea of the creative being, yet were all tolerated.

Socrates, who approached nearest to a knowledge of the Creator, is
said to have paid for it, and died a martyr to the Deity; he is the
only man whom the Greeks put to death for his opinions. If that was
really the cause of his condemnation, however, it is not to the
credit of intolerance, since they punished only the man who alone
gave glory to God, and honoured those who held unworthy views of the
Deity. The enemies of toleration would, I think, be ill advised to
quote the odious example of the judges of Socrates.

It is evident, moreover, that he was the victim of a furious party,
angered against him. He had made irreconcilable enemies of the
sophists, orators, and poets who taught in the schools, and of all
the teachers in charge of the children of distinguished men. He
himself admits, in his discourse given to us by Plato, that he went
from house to house proving to the teachers that they were ignorant.
Such conduct was hardly worthy of one whom an oracle had declared
to be the wisest of men. A priest and a councillor of the Five
Hundred were put forward to accuse him. I must confess that I do
not know what the precise accusation was; I find only vagueness in
his apology. He is made to say, in general, that he was accused of
instilling into young men sentiments in opposition to the religion
and government. It is the usual method of calumniators, but a court
would demand accredited facts and precise charges. Of these there is
no trace in the trial of Socrates. We know only that at first there
were two hundred and twenty votes in his favour. From this we may
infer that the court of the Five Hundred included two hundred and
twenty philosophers; I doubt if so many could be found elsewhere.
The majority at length condemned him to drink the hemlock; but let
us remember that, when the Athenians returned to their senses,
they regarded both the accusers and the judges with horror; that
Melitus, the chief author of the sentence, was condemned to death
for his injustice; and that the others were banished, and a temple
was erected to Socrates. Never was philosophy so much avenged and
honoured. The case of Socrates is really the most terrible argument
that can be used against intolerance. The Athenians had an altar
dedicated to foreign gods--the gods they knew not. Could there be a
stronger proof, not merely of their indulgence to all nations, but
even of respect for their cults?

A French writer, in attempting to justify the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, quotes the war of the Phocæans, known as “the sacred
war,” as if this war had been inspired by cult, or dogma, or
theological argument. Nay, it was a question only of determining to
whom a certain field belonged; it is the subject of all wars. Beards
of corn are not a symbol of faith; no Greek town ever went to war
for opinions. What, indeed, would this gentleman have? Would he have
us enter upon a “sacred war”?


                  WHETHER THE ROMANS WERE TOLERANT

Among the ancient Romans you will not find, from Romulus until the
days when the Christians disputed with the priests of the empire,
a single man persecuted on account of his opinions. Cicero doubted
everything; Lucretius denied everything; yet they incurred not
the least reproach. Indeed, license went so far that Pliny, the
naturalist, began his book by saying that there is no god, or that,
if there is, it is the sun. Cicero, speaking of the lower regions,
says: “There is no old woman so stupid as to believe in them (_Non
est anus tam excors quæ credat_).” Juvenal says: “Even the children
do not believe (_Nec pueri credunt_).” They sang in the theatre at
Rome: “There is nothing after death, and death is nothing (_Post
mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil_).” We may abhor these maxims,
or, at the most, forgive a people whom the light of the gospel had
not reached; but we must conclude that the Romans were very tolerant,
since they did not excite a single murmur.

The great principle of the Senate and people of Rome was, “Offences
against the gods are the business of the gods (_Deorum offensa diis
curæ_).” They dreamed only of conquering, governing, and civilising
the world. They were our legislators and our conquerors; and Cæsar,
who gave us roads, laws, and games, never attempted to compel us to
abandon our druids for him, great pontiff as he was of our sovereign
nation.

The Romans did not profess all cults, or assign public functions to
all, but they permitted all. They had no material object of worship
under Numa, no pictures or statues; though they presently erected
statues to “the gods of the great nations,” whom they learned from
the Greeks. The law of the Twelve Tables, _Deos peregrinos ne
colunto_ [“Foreign gods shall not be worshipped”], means only that
public cult shall be given only to the superior divinities approved
by the Senate. Isis had a temple at Rome until Tiberius destroyed it.
The Jews were engaged in commerce there since the time of the Punic
war, and had synagogues there in the days of Augustus. They kept them
almost always, as in modern Rome. Can there be a clearer proof that
toleration was regarded by the Romans as the most sacred line of the
law of nations?

We are told that, as soon as the Christians appeared, they were
persecuted by the Romans, who persecuted nobody. It seems to me that
the statement is entirely false, and I need only quote St. Paul
himself in disproof of it. In the _Acts of the Apostles_ (xxv. 16)
we read that, when Paul was dragged before the Roman Governor by the
Jews in some religious quarrel, Festus said: “It is not the manner of
the Romans to deliver any man to die before that he which is accused
have the accusers face to face, and have license to answer for
himself.” These words are the more remarkable for a Roman magistrate,
because he seems to have had nothing but contempt for Paul. Deceived
by the false light of his reason, he took Paul for a fool, and
said: “Much learning doth make thee mad.” He was, therefore, having
regard only to the equity of Roman law in giving his protection to a
stranger for whom he had no esteem.

Thus the Holy Spirit, in inspiring _Acts_, testifies that the Romans
were just, and did not persecute. It was not the Romans who fell upon
Paul, but the Jews. St. James, the brother of Jesus, was stoned by
the order of a Jewish Sadducee, not of a Roman. The Jews alone stoned
St. Stephen; and St. Paul, in holding the cloaks of the executioners,
certainly did not act as a Roman citizen.[14]

The first Christians had, no doubt, no cause of quarrel with the
Romans; their only enemies were the Jews, from whom they were
beginning to separate. We know the fierce hatred that sectarians
always have for those who leave the sect. There were probably
disturbances in the synagogues at Rome. Suetonius says, in his life
of Claudius: “Judæos impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantes Roma
expulit.”[15] He was wrong in saying that they were instigated by
Christ, and was not likely to be well informed in detail about
a people so much despised at Rome as the Jews were; but he was
not mistaken as to the subject of the quarrels. Suetonius wrote
under Hadrian, in the second century, when the Christians were
not distinct from the Jews in Roman eyes. His words show that the
Romans, instead of oppressing the first Christians, rather coerced
the Jews who persecuted them. They wished the Roman synagogue to
deal as indulgently with their separated brethren as the Senate did.
The banished Jews returned soon afterwards, and even attained high
positions, in spite of the laws which excluded them, as Dio Cassius
and Ulpian tell us. Is it possible that, after the ruin of Jerusalem,
the emperors should lavish honours on the Jews, and persecute, and
hand over to the executioner or the beasts, Christians, who were
regarded as a Jewish sect?

It is said that Nero persecuted them. Tacitus tells us that they were
accused of setting fire to Rome, and were abandoned to the fury of
the people. Was that on account of their religious belief? Certainly
not. Shall we say that the Chinese who were slain by the Dutch a
few years ago in the suburbs of Batavia were sacrificed on account
of religion? However much a man may wish to deceive himself, it is
impossible to ascribe to intolerance the disaster that befell a few
half-Jewish, half-Christian men and women at Rome under Nero.[16]


                             THE MARTYRS

There were Christian martyrs in later years. It is very difficult
to discover the precise grounds on which they were condemned; but I
venture to think that none of them were put to death on religious
grounds under the earlier emperors. All religions were tolerated,
and there is no reason to suppose that the Romans would seek out and
persecute certain obscure men, with a peculiar cult, at a time when
they permitted all other religions.

Titus, Trajan, the Antonines, and Decius were not barbarians. How
can we suppose that they deprived the Christians alone of a liberty
which the whole empire enjoyed? How could they venture to charge the
Christians with their secret mysteries when the mysteries of Isis,
Mithra, and the Syrian goddess, all alien to the Roman cult, were
freely permitted? There must have been other reasons for persecution.
Possibly certain special animosities, supported by reasons of State,
led to the shedding of Christian blood.

For instance, when St. Lawrence refused to give to the Roman prefect,
Cornelius Secularis, the money of the Christians which he held, the
prefect and emperor would naturally be irritated. They did not know
that St. Lawrence had distributed the money to the poor, and done a
charitable and holy act. They regarded him as rebellious, and had him
put to death.[17]

Consider the martyrdom of St. Polyeuctes. Was he condemned on the
ground of religion alone? He enters the temple, in which thanks are
being given to the gods for the victory of the Emperor Decius. He
insults the sacrificing priests, and overturns and breaks the altars
and statues. In what country in the world would such an outrage be
overlooked? The Christian who in public tore down the edict of the
Emperor Diocletian, and drew the great persecution upon his brethren
in the last two years of the reign of that emperor, had more zeal
than discretion, and, unhappily, brought a great disaster on the body
to which he belonged. This unthinking zeal, which often broke out,
and was condemned even by some of the fathers of the Church, was
probably the cause of all the persecutions.

I do not, of course, compare the early Protestants with the early
Christians; one cannot put error by the side of truth. But it is a
fact that Forel, the predecessor of Calvin, did at Arles the same
thing that St. Polyeuctes had done in Armenia. The statue of St.
Antony the Hermit was being carried in procession, and Forel and
some of his companions fell on the monks who carried it, beat and
scattered them, and threw St. Antony in the river. He deserved
the death which he managed to evade by flight.[18] If he had been
content to call out to the monks that he did not believe that a crow
brought half a loaf to St. Antony the Hermit, or that St. Antony
conversed with centaurs and satyrs, he would merely have merited a
stern rebuke for disturbing public order; and if, the evening after
the procession, he had calmly studied the story of the crow, the
centaurs, and the satyrs, they would have had no reproach to make him.

You think that the Romans would have suffered the infamous
Antinous[19] to be raised to the rank of the secondary gods, and
would have rent and given to the beasts those whose only reproach
was to have quietly worshipped one just God! You imagine that they
would have recognised a supreme and sovereign God, master of all the
secondary gods, as we see in their formula, _Deus optimus maximus_,
yet persecuted those who worshipped one sole God!

It is incredible that there was any inquisition against the
Christians--that men were sent among them to interrogate them on
their beliefs--under the emperors. On that point they never troubled
either Jew, Syrian, Egyptian, Druid, or philosopher. The martyrs
were men who made an outcry against what they called false gods. It
was a very wise and pious thing to refuse to believe in them; but,
after all, if, not content with worshipping God in spirit and in
truth, they broke out violently against the established cult, however
absurd it was, we are compelled to admit that they were themselves
intolerant.[20]

Tertullian admits in his _Apology_ (ch. xxxix.) that the Christians
were regarded as seditious. The charge was unjust, but it shows that
it was not merely their religion which stimulated the zeal of the
magistrates. He admits that the Christians refused to decorate their
doors with laurel branches in the public rejoicings for the victories
of the emperors; such an affectation might easily be turned into the
crime of treason.

The first period of juridical severity against the Christians was
under Domitian, but it was generally restricted to a banishment that
did not last a year. “Facile coeptum repressit, restitutis quos
ipse relegaverat,” says Tertullian [“He quickly repressed the work,
restoring those whom he had banished”]. Lactantius, whose style is so
vehement, agrees that the Church was peaceful and flourishing from
Domitian to Decius [96-250 A.D.].[21] This long peace, he says, was
broken when “that execrable animal Decius began to vex the Church.”

We need not discuss here the opinion of the learned Dodwell that
the martyrs were few in number; but if the Romans persecuted the
Christian religion, if the Senate had put to death so many innocent
men with unusual tortures--plunging Christians in boiling oil and
exposing girls naked to the beasts in the circus--how is it that they
left untouched all the earlier bishops of Rome? St. Irenæus can count
among them only one martyr, Telesphorus, in the year 139 A.D.; and we
have no proof that Telesphorus was put to death. Zepherinus governed
the flock at Rome for twenty-eight years, and died peacefully in
219. It is true that nearly all the popes are inscribed in the early
martyrologies, but the word “martyr” was then taken in its literal
sense, as “witness,” not as one put to death.

It is difficult to reconcile this persecuting fury with the freedom
which the Christians had to hold the fifty-six Councils which
ecclesiastical writers count in the first three centuries.

There were persecutions; but if they were as violent as we are told,
it is probable that Tertullian, who wrote so vigorously against the
established cult, would not have died in his bed. We know, of course,
that the emperors would not read his _Apology_--an obscure work,
composed in Africa, would hardly reach those who were ruling the
world. But it must have been known to those who were in touch with
the proconsul of Africa, and ought to have brought a good deal of
ill-feeling on its author. He did not, however, suffer martyrdom.

Origen taught publicly at Alexandria, and was not put to death.
This same Origen, who spoke so freely to both pagans and
Christians--announcing Jesus to the former and denying a God in three
persons to the latter--says expressly, in the third book of his
_Contra Celsum_, that “there have been few martyrs, and those at long
intervals”; although, he says, “the Christians do all in their power
to make everybody embrace their religion, running about the towns and
villages.”

It is clear that a seditious complexion might be put by the hostile
priests on all this running about, yet the missions were tolerated,
in spite of the constant and cowardly disorders of the Egyptian
people, who killed a Roman for slaying a cat, and were always
contemptible.[22]

Who did more to bring upon him the priests and the government than
St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, a pupil of Origen? Gregory saw, during
the night, an old man, sent by God, and a woman shining with light;
the woman was the Virgin, and the man St. John the Evangelist. John
dictated to him a creed, which Gregory went out to preach. In going
to Neocæsarea he passed by a temple in which oracles were given, and
the rain compelled him to spend the night in it, after making many
signs of the cross. The following day the sacrificing priest was
astonished to find that the demons who were wont to answer him would
do so no longer. When he called, they said that they would come no
more, and could not live in the temple, because Gregory had spent the
night in it and made the sign of the cross in it.

The priest had Gregory seized, and Gregory said: “I can expel the
demons from wherever I like, and drive them into wherever I like.”
“Send them back into my temple, then,” said the priest. So Gregory
tore off a piece from a book he had in his hand and wrote on it:
“Gregory to Satan: I order thee to return to this temple.” The
message was placed on the altar, and the demons obeyed, and gave the
oracles as before.

St. Gregory of Nyssa tells us these facts in his _Life of St. Gregory
Thaumaturgus_. The priests in charge of the idols must have been
incensed against Gregory, and wished, in their blindness, to denounce
him to the magistrates. But their greatest enemy never suffered
persecution.

It is said that St. Cyprian was the first bishop of Carthage to be
condemned to death, in the year 258. During a very long period,
therefore, no bishop of Carthage suffered for his religion. History
does not tell us what charges were made against St. Cyprian, what
enemies he had, and why the proconsul of Africa was angry with him.
St. Cyprian writes to Cornelius, bishop of Rome: “There was, a short
time ago, some popular disturbance at Carthage, and the cry was twice
raised that I ought to be cast to the lions.” It is very probable
that the excitement of the passionate populace of Carthage was the
cause of the death of Cyprian; it is, at all events, certain that the
Emperor Gallus did not condemn him on the ground of religion from
distant Rome, since he left untouched Cornelius, who lived under his
eyes.

So many hidden causes are associated at times with the apparent
cause, so many unknown springs may be at work in the persecution of
a man, that it is impossible, centuries afterwards, to discover the
hidden source of the misfortunes even of distinguished men; it is
still more difficult to explain the persecution of an individual who
must have been known only to those of his own party.

Observe that St. Gregory Thaumaturgus and St. Denis, bishop of
Alexandria, who were not put to death, lived at the same time as
St. Cyprian. How is it that they were left in peace, since they
were, at least, as well known as the bishop of Carthage? And why was
Cyprian put to death? Does it not seem as if the latter fell a victim
to personal and powerful enemies, under the pretext of calumny or
reasons of State, which are so often associated with religion, and
that the former were fortunate enough to escape the malice of men?

It is impossible that the mere charge of being a Christian led to
the death of St. Ignatius under the clement and just Trajan, since
the Christians were allowed to accompany and console him during his
voyage to Rome. Seditions were common at Antioch, always a turbulent
city, where Ignatius was secret bishop of the Christians. Possibly
these seditions were imputed to the Christians, and brought the
authorities upon them.

St. Simeon, for instance, was charged before Sapor with being a Roman
spy. The story of his martyrdom tells that King Sapor ordered him to
worship the sun, but we know that the Persians did not worship the
sun; they regarded it as an emblem of the good principle Ormuzd, the
god whom they recognised.

However tolerant we may be, we cannot help being indignant with the
rhetoricians who accuse Diocletian of persecuting the Christians as
soon as he ascended the throne. Let us consult Eusebius of Cæsarea,
the favourite and panegyrist of Constantine, the violent enemy of
preceding emperors. He says (_Ecclesiastical History_, Bk. VIII.):
“The emperors for a long time gave the Christians proof of their
goodwill. They entrusted provinces to them; several Christians lived
in the palace; they even married Christians. Diocletian married
Prisca, whose daughter was the wife of Maximianus Galerius.”

We may well suspect that the persecution set afoot by Galerius, after
a clement and benevolent reign of twenty-nine years, was due to some
intrigue that is unknown to us.[23]

The story of the massacre of the Theban Legion on religious grounds
is absurd. It is ridiculous to say that the legion came from Asia
by the great St. Bernard Pass; it is impossible that it should be
brought from Asia at all to quell a sedition in Gaul--a year after
the sedition broke out, moreover; it is not less incredible that
six thousand infantry and seven hundred cavalry could be slain in a
pass in which two hundred men could hold at bay a whole army. The
account of this supposed butchery begins with an evident imposture:
“When the earth groaned under the tyranny of Diocletian, heaven was
peopled with saints.” Now, this episode is supposed to have taken
place in 286, a time when Diocletian favoured the Christians, and the
empire flourished.[24] Finally--a point which might dispense us from
discussion altogether--there never was a Theban Legion. The Romans
had too much pride and common-sense to make up a legion of Egyptians,
who served only as slaves at Rome; one might as well talk of a Jewish
Legion. We have the names of the thirty-two legions which represented
the chief strength of the Roman Empire, and there is no Theban
Legion among them. We must relegate the fable to the same category
as the acrostic verses of the Sibyls, which foretold the miracles of
Christ, and so many other forgeries with which a false zeal duped the
credulous.


         OF THE DANGER OF FALSE LEGENDS, AND OF PERSECUTION

Untruth has imposed on men too long; it is time to pick out the few
truths that we can trace amid the clouds of legends which brood over
Roman history after Tacitus and Suetonius, and have almost always
enveloped the annals of other nations.

How can we believe, for instance, that the Romans, whose laws
exhibit to us a people of grave and severe character, exposed to
prostitution Christian virgins and young women of rank? It is a gross
misunderstanding of the austere dignity of the makers of our laws,
who punished so rigorously the frailties of their vestal virgins. The
“Sincere Acts” of Ruinart describe these indignities; but are we to
put the “Acts” of Ruinart on a level with the _Acts of the Apostles_?
These “Sincere Acts” say, according to the Bollandists, that there
were in the town of Ancyra seven Christian virgins, each about
seventy years old; that the governor Theodectes condemned them to be
handed over to the young men of the town; and that he changed the
sentence, as was proper, and compelled them to assist, naked, in the
mysteries of Diana--at which none ever assisted without a veil. St.
Theodotus--who, to tell the truth, kept a public-house, but was not
less zealous on that account--prayed ardently to God to take these
holy maidens out of life, lest they should succumb to temptation. God
heard him. The governor then had them thrown into a lake, with stones
round their necks, and they at once appeared to Theodotus and begged
him to see that their bodies were not eaten by fishes.

The holy publican and his companions went during the night to the
shore of the lake, which was guarded by soldiers. A heavenly torch
went before them, and when they came to the spot where the guards
were, a heavenly cavalier, armed from top to toe, chased the guards,
lance in hand. St. Theodotus drew from the lake the bodies of the
virgins. He was brought before the governor--and the celestial
cavalier did not prevent the soldiers from cutting off his head.
We repeat that we venerate the real martyrs, but it is not easy to
believe this story of the Bollandists and Ruinart.

Shall we tell the story of the young St. Romanus? He was cast into
the flames, says Eusebius, and certain Jews who were present insulted
Jesus Christ for allowing his followers to be burned, whereas God had
withdrawn Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace.
Hardly had the Jews spoken when Romanus emerged in triumph from the
flames. The emperor ordered that he should be pardoned, saying to the
judge that he did not want to fall foul of God. Curious words for
Diocletian! The judge, in spite of the emperor’s pardon, ordered the
tongue of Romanus to be cut out; and, although he had executioners,
he had this operation performed by a physician. The young Romanus,
who had stuttered from birth, spoke volubly as soon as his tongue was
cut out. The physician, to show that the operation had been properly
performed, took a man who was passing and cut off just as much of
his tongue as he had done in the case of Romanus, and the man died.
“Anatomy teaches us,” says the author, learnedly, “that a man cannot
live without a tongue.” If Eusebius really wrote this nonsense, and
the passage is not an interpolation, it is difficult to take his
history seriously.

Then there is the martyrdom of St. Felicitas and her seven children,
sent to death, it is said, by the wise and pius Antoninus. In
this case it seems probable that some writer with more zeal than
truthfulness has imitated the story of the Maccabees. The narrative
begins: “St. Felicitas was a Roman, and lived in the reign of
Antoninus.” From these words it is clear that the author was not a
contemporary of St. Felicitas. He says that the prætor sat to judge
them in the Campus Martius. The forgery is exposed by this statement.
The Campus Martius, which had once been used for the elections, then
served for reviews of the troops and for military games. Again, it is
said that after the trial the emperor entrusted the execution of the
sentence to various judges; which is quite opposed to all procedure
at that time or in our own.

Then there is a St. Hippolytus, who is supposed to have been dragged
by horses, like Hippolytus the son of Theseus. This punishment was
quite unknown to the Romans, and it is merely the similarity of name
that has led to the invention of the legend.

You will observe in these accounts of the martyrs, which were
composed entirely by the Christians themselves, that crowds of
Christians always go freely to the prison of the condemned, follow
him to the scaffold, receive his blood, bury his body, and work
miracles with his relics. If it were the religion alone that was
persecuted, would not the authorities have arrested these declared
Christians who assisted their condemned brethren, and who were
accused of performing magic with the martyred bodies? Would they not
have been treated as we treated the Waldensians, the Albigenses,
the Hussites, and the various sects of Protestants? We slew them
and burned them in crowds, without distinction of age or sex. Is
there, in any reliable account of the ancient persecutions, any
single feature that approaches our massacre of St. Bartholomew or the
Irish massacres? Is there a single one with any resemblance to the
annual festival that is still held at Toulouse--a cruel and damnable
festival, in which a whole people thanks God and congratulates itself
that it slew four thousand of its fellow-citizens two hundred years
ago?

I say it with a shudder, but it is true; it is we Christians who have
been the persecutors, the executioners, the assassins. And who were
our victims? Our brothers. It is we who have destroyed a hundred
towns, the crucifix or Bible in our hands, and have incessantly shed
blood and lit flames from the reign of Constantine to the fury of the
cannibals of the Cévènes.

We still occasionally send to the gibbet a few poor folk of Poitou,
Vivarais, Valence, or Montauban. Since 1745 [a period of seven years]
we have hanged eight of those men who are known as “preachers” or
“ministers of the gospel,” whose only crime was to have prayed God
for the king in their native dialect and given a drop of wine and a
morsel of leavened bread to a few silly peasants. These things are
not done at Paris, where pleasure is the only thing of consequence,
and people are ignorant of what is done in the provinces and abroad.
These trials are over in an hour; they are shorter than the trial of
a deserter. If the king were aware of them, he would put an end to
them.

Catholic priests are not treated thus in any Protestant country.
There are more than a hundred Catholic priests in England and
Ireland; they are known, and were untouched during the late war.

Shall we always be the last to embrace the wholesome ideas of other
nations? They have amended their ways; when shall we amend ours? It
took us sixty years to admit what Newton had demonstrated; we are
hardly beginning to save the lives of our children by inoculation;
and it is only recently that we have begun to act on sound principles
of agriculture. When shall we begin to act on sound principles of
humanity? How can we have the audacity to reproach the pagans with
making martyrs when we have been guilty of the same cruelty in the
same circumstances?

Suppose we grant that the Romans put to death numbers of Christians
on purely religious grounds. In that case the Romans were very
much to blame. Why should we be similarly unjust? Would we become
persecutors at the very time when we reproach them with persecuting?

If any man were so wanting in good faith, or so fanatical, as to say
to me: “Why do you come to expose our blunders and faults? Why do
you destroy our false miracles and false legends? They nourish the
piety of many people; there are such things as necessary errors;
do not tear out of the body an incurable ulcer if it would entail
the destruction of the body”; I should reply to this man: All these
false miracles by which you shake the trust that should be given
to real ones, all these absurd legends which you add to the truths
of the gospels, extinguish religion in the hearts of men. Too many
people who long for instruction, and have not the time to instruct
themselves, say: “The heads of my religion have deceived me,
therefore there is no religion. It is better to cast oneself into the
arms of nature than into those of error; I would rather depend on the
law of nature than on the inventions of men.” Some are so unfortunate
as to go even farther. They see that imposture put a curb on them,
and they will not have even the curb of truth. They lean to atheism.
They become depraved, because others have been false and cruel.

These, assuredly, are the consequences of all the pious frauds and
all the superstitions. The reasoning of men is, as a rule, only
half-reasoning. It is a very poor argument to say: “Voraginé, the
author of the _Golden Legend_, and the Jesuit Ribadeneira, compiler
of the _Flowers of the Saints_, wrote sheer nonsense; therefore there
is no God. The Catholics have murdered a certain number of Huguenots,
and the Huguenots have murdered a certain number of Catholics;
therefore there is no God. Men have made use of confession,
communion, and all the other sacraments, to commit the most horrible
crimes: therefore there is no God.” I should conclude, on the
contrary: Therefore there is a God who, after this transitory life,
in which we have known him so little, and committed so many crimes
in his name, will vouchsafe to console us for our misfortunes. For,
considering the wars of religion, the forty papal schisms (nearly
all of which were bloody), the impostures which have nearly all been
pernicious, the irreconcilable hatreds lit by differences of opinion,
and all the evils that false zeal has brought upon them, men have
long suffered hell in this world.


                        ABUSES OF INTOLERANCE

Do I propose, then, that every citizen shall be free to follow his
own reason, and believe whatever this enlightened or deluded reason
shall dictate to him? Certainly, provided he does not disturb the
public order. It does not depend on man to believe or not to believe;
but it depends on him to respect the usages of his country. If you
insist that it is a crime to disbelieve in the dominant religion, you
condemn the first Christians, your fathers, and you justify those
whom you reproach with persecuting them.

You say that there is a great difference; that all other religions
are the work of man, and the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church
alone is the work of God. But, surely, the fact that our religion
is divine does not imply that it should rule by hatred, fury,
exile, the confiscation of goods, imprisonment, torture, murder,
and thanksgiving to God for murder? The more divine the Christian
religion is, the less it is the place of man to command it; if God is
its author, he will maintain it without your aid. You know well that
intolerance begets only hypocrites or rebels. Fearful alternative!
Would you, indeed, sustain by executioners the religion of a God who
fell into the hands of executioners, and who preached only gentleness
and patience?

Reflect on the frightful consequences of the right of intolerance.
If it were allowed to despoil, cast in prison, and put to death a
citizen who, at a certain degree of latitude, would not profess the
religion generally admitted at that degree, how could we except the
leaders of the State from those penalties? Religion equally binds
the monarch and the beggar; hence more than fifty doctors or monks
have made the monstrous assertion that it was lawful to depose or
slay any sovereign who dissented from the dominant religion, and the
Parliaments of our kingdom have repeatedly condemned these abominable
decisions of abominable theologians.[25]

The blood of Henry the Great [IV.] was still warm when the Parlement
de Paris issued a decree making the independence of the Crown a
fundamental law. Cardinal Duperron, who owed his position to Henry
the Great, arose in the States of 1614 against the decree of the
Parlement, and had it suppressed. All the journals of the time record
the terms which Duperron used in his discourse: “If a prince became
an Arian,” he said, “we should be obliged to depose him.”

Let us be allowed to say that every citizen is entitled to inherit
his father’s property, and that we do not see why he should be
deprived of it, and dragged to the gibbet, because he takes sides
with one theologian against another.

We know that our dogmas were not always clearly explained and
universally received in the Church. Christ not having said in what
manner the Holy Ghost proceeded, the Latin Church long believed
with the Greek that he proceeded from the Father only; after a time
it added, in the Creed, that he also proceeded from the Son. I ask
whether, the day after this decision, any citizen who preferred
to keep to the old formula deserved to be put to death? But is it
less unjust and cruel to punish to-day the man who thinks as people
thought in former times? Were men guilty in the days of Honorius I.
because they did not believe that Jesus had two wills?

It is not long since the Immaculate Conception began to be generally
accepted; the Dominicans still refuse to believe it.[26] At what
particular date will these Dominicans incur the penalties of heresy
in this world and the next?

If we need a lesson how to behave in these interminable disputes, we
should look to the apostles and evangelists. There was ground for a
violent schism between Peter and Paul, and Paul withstood Peter to
the face, but the controversy was peacefully settled. The evangelists
in turn had a great field of combat, if they had resembled modern
writers. They contradict each other frequently; yet we find no
dissension among their followers over these contradictions, and they
are neatly reconciled by the fathers of the Church. St. Paul, in his
epistle to a few Jews at Rome who had been converted to Christianity,
says at the end of the third chapter that faith alone glorifies, and
works justify no one. St. James, on the contrary, in his epistle (ch.
ii.) says constantly that one cannot be saved without works. Here
is a point that has separated two great sects among us, yet made no
division among the apostles.

If the persecution of those with whom we dispute were a holy action,
the man who had killed most heretics would be the greatest saint in
Paradise. What a poor figure the man who had been content to despoil
and imprison his brothers would cut by the side of the zealot who had
slain hundreds of them on St. Bartholomew’s day! Here is a proof of
it. The successor of St. Peter and his consistory cannot err. They
approved, acclaimed, and consecrated the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Therefore this deed was holy; and therefore of two assassins who were
equal in piety one who had killed twenty-four Huguenot women would
have double the glory of the man who had killed only a dozen. By the
same reasoning the fanatics of Cévènes would have ground to believe
that they would be elevated in glory in proportion to the number of
priests, monks, and Catholic women they had slain. It is a strange
title to glory in heaven.


         WHETHER INTOLERANCE WAS OF DIVINE RIGHT IN JUDAISM,
              AND WHETHER IT WAS ALWAYS PRACTISED.[27]

Divine right means, I believe, the precepts which God himself has
given. He ordered that the Jews should eat a lamb cooked with
lettuces, and that the eaters should stand, with a stick in their
hands, in commemoration of the Passover; he commanded that in the
consecration of the high-priest blood should be applied to his right
ear, right hand, and right foot. They seem curious customs to us, but
they were not to antiquity. He ordered them to put the iniquities of
the people on the goat _hazazel_, and forbade them to eat scaleless
fishes, hares, hedgehogs, owls, griffins, etc. He instituted feasts
and ceremonies.

All these things, which seem arbitrary to other nations, and a matter
of positive law and usage, being ordered by God himself, became a
divine law to the Jews, just as whatever Christ ordered is a divine
law for us. Let us not inquire why God substituted a new law for that
which he gave to Moses, and why he laid more commandments on Moses
than on Abraham, and more on Abraham than on Noah. It seems that he
deigns to accommodate himself to the times and the state of the human
race. It is a kind of paternal gradation. But these abysses are too
deep for our feeble sight. Let us keep to our subject, and see first
what intolerance was among the Jews.

It is true that in _Exodus_, _Numbers_, _Leviticus_, and
_Deuteronomy_ there are very severe laws, and even more severe
punishments, in connection with religion. Many commentators find
a difficulty in reconciling the words of Moses with the words of
Jeremiah and Amos, and those of the celebrated speech of St. Stephen
in _Acts_. Amos says that in the deserts the Jews worshipped Moloch,
Rempham, and Kium. Jeremiah says explicitly (vii., 12) that God
asked no sacrifice of their fathers when they came out of Egypt.
St. Stephen says in his speech to the Jews (_Acts_ vii., 42): “Then
God turned and gave them up to worship the host of heaven; as it is
written in the book of the prophets, O ye house of Israel, have ye
offered to me slain beasts and sacrifices for the space of forty
years in the wilderness? Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch,
and the star of your god Rempham.”

Other critics infer that these gods were tolerated by Moses, and they
quote these words of _Deuteronomy_ (xii., 8): “When ye are in the
land of Canaan, ye shall not do all the things that we do here this
day, where every man does what he pleases.” They find encouragement
in the fact that nothing is said of any religious act of the people
in the desert, and there is no mention of Passover, Pentecost,
Feast of Tabernacles, or public prayer in any shape. Circumcision,
moreover, the seal of the covenant, was not practised.

It is enough, it seems to me, that it is proved by Holy Scripture
that, in spite of the extraordinary punishment inflicted on the Jews
on account of the cult of Apis, they had complete liberty for a long
time. Possibly the massacre of twenty-three thousand men by Moses
for worshipping the golden calf set up by his brother led him to
appreciate that nothing was gained by severity, and induced him to
close his eyes to the people’s passion for strange gods.

Sometimes he seems to transgress his own law. He forbade the making
of images, yet set up a brazen serpent. We find another deviation
from the law in the temple of Solomon. He had twelve oxen carved to
sustain the great basin of the temple, and in the ark were placed
cherubim with the heads of eagles and calves. It seems to have
been this calf-head, badly made, and found in the temple by Roman
soldiers, which led to the belief that the Jews worshipped an ass.

The worship of foreign gods was vainly prohibited. Solomon was quite
at his ease in idolatry. Jeroboam, to whom God had given ten parts
of the kingdom, set up two golden calves, and ruled for twenty-two
years, uniting in his person the dignities of monarch and pontiff.
The little kingdom of Judah under Rehoboam raised altars and statues
to foreign gods. The holy king Asa did not destroy the high places.
The high-priest Urijah erects in the temple, in the place of the
altar of holocausts, an altar to the king of Syria (2 _Kings_,
xvi.). In a word, there seems to be no real restraint in matters of
religion. I know that the majority of the Jewish kings murdered each
other, but that was always to further a material interest, not on
account of belief.[28]

It is true that some of the prophets secured the interest of heaven
in their vengeance. Elias brought down fire from heaven to consume
the priests of Baal. Elisha caused forty-two bears to devour the
children who commented on his baldness. But these are rare miracles,
and facts that it would be rather hard to wish to imitate.

It is also objected that the Jewish people were very ignorant and
barbaric. In the war with the Midianites Moses ordered that all
the male children and their mothers should be slain and the booty
divided. Some commentators even argue that thirty-two girls were
sacrificed to the Lord: “The Lord’s tribute was thirty and two
persons [virgins]” (_Numbers_ xxxii., 40). That the Jews did offer
human sacrifices is seen in the story of Jephthah [_Judges_ xi., 39],
and the cutting-up of King Agag by the priest Samuel. Ezekiel even
promises that they will eat human flesh: “Ye shall eat the horse and
the rider; ye shall drink the blood of princes.” Some commentators
apply two verses of this prophecy to the Jews themselves, and the
others to the carnivorous beasts. We do not find in the whole history
of this people any mark of generosity, magnanimity, or beneficence;
yet some ray of toleration escapes always from the cloud of their
long and frightful barbarism.

The story of Micah and the Levite, told in chapters xvii. and xviii.
of _Judges_, is another incontestable proof of the great liberty
and toleration that prevailed among the Jews. Micah’s wife, a rich
Ephraimite woman, had lost eleven hundred pieces of silver. Her
son restored them to her, and she devoted them to the Lord, making
images of him, and built a small chapel. A Levite served the chapel,
receiving ten pieces of silver, a tunic, and a cloak every year,
besides his food; and Micah said: “Now know I the Lord will do me
good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest” (xvii., 13).

However, six hundred men of the tribe of Dan, who wanted to seize
some village of the district to settle in, and had no priest-Levite
to secure the favour of God for their enterprise, went to Micah’s
house, and took the ephod, idols, and Levite, in spite of the
remonstrances of the priest and the cries of Micah and his mother.
They then proceeded with confidence to attack the village of Lais,
and put everything in it to fire and sword, as was their custom.
They gave the name of Dan to Lais in honour of their victory, and
set Micah’s idol on an altar; and, what is still more remarkable,
Jonathan, grandson of Moses, was the high priest of this temple, in
which the God of Israel and Micah’s idol were worshipped.

After the death of Gideon the Hebrews worshipped Baal-berith for
nearly twenty years, and gave up the cult of Adonai; and no leader or
judge or priest cried for vengeance. Their crime was great, I admit;
but if such idolatry was tolerated, how much the more easily should
we tolerate differences within the proper cult.

Some allege as a proof of intolerance that, when the Lord himself
had allowed his ark to be taken by the Philistines in a battle, the
only punishment he inflicted on the Philistines was a secret disease,
resembling hemorrhoids, the overthrowing of the statue of Dagon, and
the sending of a number of rats into their country. And when the
Philistines, to appease his anger, had sent back the ark, drawn by
two cows, which had calves, and offered to God five golden rats and
five golden anuses, the Lord slew seventy elders of Israel and fifty
thousand of the people for looking at the ark. The answer is plain,
therefore: the Lord’s chastisement is not connected with belief, or
difference of cult, or idolatry.

Had the Lord wished to punish idolatry, he would have slain all the
Philistines who dared to take his ark, and who worshipped Dagon; but
he slew instead fifty thousand and seventy men of his own people
merely because they looked at an ark at which they ought not to have
looked. So different are the laws, the morals, and the economy of the
Jews from anything that we know to-day; so far are the inscrutable
ways of God above our own! However, God is not punishing a foreign
cult, but a profanation of his own, an indiscreet curiosity, an act
of disobedience, possibly a spirit of revolt. We realise that such
chastisements belong to God only in the Jewish theocracy. We cannot
repeat too often that these times and ways have no relation to our
own.

Again, when in later years the idolatrous Naaman asked Elisha if
he were allowed to accompany his king to the temple of Rimmon, and
worship with him, Elisha--the man who caused children to be devoured
by bears--merely said, “Go in peace.” More remarkable still is the
fact that the Lord orders Jeremiah to put cords and yokes round his
neck, and send them to the kings of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Tyre, and
Sidon, saying, on the part of the Lord: “I have given all your lands
to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, my servant.” Here we have an
idolatrous king declared to be the servant and favourite of God.

The same Jeremiah, whom the petty king of the Jews, Zedekiah, had put
in prison and then pardoned, advises the king, on the part of God,
to surrender to the king of Babylon. Thus God takes the part of an
idolatrous king. He gives him possession of the ark, the mere sight
of which had cost fifty thousand and seventy Jews their lives, the
holy of holies, and the rest of the temple, the building of which
had cost a hundred and eight thousand gold talents, a million and
seventeen thousand silver talents, and ten thousand gold drachmas,
left by David and his officers for the construction of the house of
the Lord; which, without counting the funds used by Solomon, amounts
to nineteen thousand and sixty-two million francs, or thereabouts,
of our money [more than £750,000,000]. Never was idolatry so signally
rewarded! I am aware that the figure is exaggerated, and may be due
to a copyist; but if you reduce the sum by half, or to a fourth or
an eighth, it is still astonishing. One is hardly less surprised at
the wealth which Herodotus says he saw in the temple of Ephesus. But
treasures are nothing in the eyes of God; the title of his “servant,”
which is given to Nebuchadnezzar, is the only real treasure.

God is equally favourable to Kir, or Koresh, or Kosroes, whom we call
Cyrus. He calls him “his Christ,” “his Anointed,” although he was not
anointed in the ordinary meaning of the word, and he followed the
religion of Zoroaster; he calls him his “shepherd,” though he was a
usurper in the eyes of men. There is no greater mark of predilection
in the whole of Scripture.

You read in _Malachi_ that “from the east to the west the name of God
is great among the nations, and pure oblations are everywhere offered
to him.” God takes as much care of the idolatrous Ninevites as of the
Jews; he threatens and pardons them. Melchizedech, who was not a Jew,
sacrificed to God. The idolatrous Balaam was a prophet. Scripture
shows, therefore, that God not only tolerated other peoples, but took
a paternal care of them. And we dare to be intolerant!


                    EXTREME TOLERANCE OF THE JEWS

Hence both under Moses, the judges, and the kings you find constant
instances of toleration. Moses says several times (_Exodus_ xx.)
that “God punishes the fathers in the children, down to the fourth
generation”; and it was necessary thus to threaten a people to whom
God had not revealed the immortality of the soul, or the punishments
and rewards of another life. These truths were not made known either
in the Decalogue or any part of _Leviticus_ or _Deuteronomy_. They
were dogmas of the Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and
Cretans; but they by no means formed part of the Jewish religion.
Moses does not say: “Honour thy father and thy mother if thou
wouldst go to heaven”; but: “Honour thy father and thy mother, that
thou mayst live long on the earth.” He threatens the Jews only with
bodily maladies and other material evils. Nowhere does he tell
them that their immortal souls will be tortured after death or be
rewarded. God, who himself led his people, punished or rewarded them
at once for their good or bad actions. Everything was temporal.
Those who ignorantly maintain that Moses taught the immortality of
the soul strip the New Testament of one of its greatest advantages
over the Old Testament. It is certain that the law of Moses spoke
only of temporal chastisement, down to the fourth generation.
However, in spite of the precise formulation of this law and the
express declaration of God that he would punish down to the fourth
generation, Ezekiel announces the very opposite to the Jews. He says
(xviii., 20) that the son will not bear the iniquity of his father;
and he even goes so far as to make God say that he had given them
“statutes that were not good” (xx., 25).

The book of _Ezekiel_ was nevertheless inserted in the canon of
inspired writers. It is true that the synagogue did not allow any one
to read it until he was thirty years old, as St. Jerome tells us;
but that was in order that young men might not make evil use of the
too candid pictures of vice in chapters xvi. and xxiii. The book was
always received, in spite of the fact that it expressly contradicted
Moses.

When the immortality of the soul was at length admitted, which
probably began about the time of the Babylonian captivity, the
Sadducees continued to believe that there were no punishments and
rewards after death, and that the power of feeling and thinking
perished with us, like the power of walking and digesting. They
denied the existence of angels. They differed from the other Jews
much more than Protestants differ from Catholics, yet they remained
in the communion of their brethren. Some of their sect even became
high-priests.

The Pharisees believed in fatalism and metempsychosis. The Essenians
thought that the souls of the just went to the Fortunate Islands,
and those of the wicked into a kind of Tartarus. They offered no
sacrifices, and met in a special synagogue. Thus, when we look
closely into Judaism, we are astonished to find the greatest
toleration in the midst of the most barbaric horrors. It is a
contradiction, we must admit; nearly all nations have been ruled by
contradictions. Happy the contradiction that brings gentler ways into
a people with bloody laws.


              WHETHER INTOLERANCE WAS TAUGHT BY CHRIST

Let us now see whether Jesus Christ set up sanguinary laws, enjoined
intolerance, ordered the building of dungeons of the inquisition, or
instituted bodies of executioners.

There are, if I am not mistaken, few passages in the gospels from
which the persecuting spirit might deduce that intolerance and
constraint are lawful. One is the parable in which the kingdom
of heaven is compared to a king who invites his friends to the
wedding-feast of his son (_Matthew_ xxii.). The king says to them,
by means of his servants: “My oxen and my fatlings are killed, and
all things are ready. Come unto the marriage.” Some go off to their
country houses, without taking any notice of the invitation; others
go about their business; others assault and slay the king’s servants.
The king sends his army against the murderers, and destroys their
town. He then sends out on the high road to bring in to the feast all
who can be found. One of these sits at table without a wedding dress,
and is put in irons and cast into outer darkness.

It is clear that, as this allegory concerns only the kingdom of
heaven, it certainly does not give a man the right to strangle or
put in jail a neighbour who comes to sup with him not wearing a
festive garment. I do not remember reading anywhere in history of
a prince who had a courtier arrested on that ground. It is hardly
more probable that, if an emperor sent his pages to tell the princes
of his empire that he had killed his fatlings and invited them to
supper, the princes would kill the pages. The invitation to the
feast means selection for salvation; the murder of the king’s envoys
represents the persecution of those who preach wisdom and virtue.

The other parable (_Luke_ xiv.) tells of a man who invites his
friends to a grand supper. When he is ready to sit at table, he sends
his servant to inform them. One pleads that he has bought an estate,
and must go to visit it; as one does not usually go to see an estate
during the night, the excuse does not hold. Another says that he has
bought five pairs of oxen, and must try them; his excuse is as weak
as the preceding--one does not try oxen during the night. A third
replies that he has just married; and that, assuredly, is a good
excuse. Then the holder of the banquet angrily summons the blind and
the lame to the feast, and, seeing that there are still empty places,
says to his valet: “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel
them to come in.”

It is true that this parable is not expressly said to be a figure
of the kingdom of heaven. There has, unhappily, been too much abuse
of these words, “Compel them to come in”; but it is obvious that a
single valet could not forcibly compel all the people he meets to
come and sup with his master. Moreover, compulsory guests of this
sort would not make the dinner very agreeable. According to the
weightiest commentators, “Compel them to come in” merely means “Beg,
entreat, and press them to come in.” What, I ask you, have this
entreaty and supper to do with persecution?

If you want to take things literally, will you say that a man must
be blind and lame, and compelled by force, to be in the bosom of the
Church? Jesus says in the same parable: “When thou makest a dinner
or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy
kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours.” Has any one ever inferred from
this that we must not dine with our kinsmen and friends when they
have acquired a little money?

After the parable of the feast Christ says (_Luke_ xiv. 26): “If any
man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and
children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also,
he cannot be my disciple.... For which of you, intending to build
a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost?” Is there
anybody in the world so unnatural as to conclude that one must hate
one’s father and mother? Is it not clear that the meaning is: Do not
hesitate between me and your dearest affections?

The passage in _Matthew_ (xviii., 17) is quoted: “If he neglect
to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a
publican.” That does not absolutely say that we must persecute pagans
and the farmers of the king’s taxes; they are cursed, it is true,
but they are not handed over to the secular arm. Instead of the
prerogatives of citizenship being taken from these farmers of taxes,
they have received the greatest privileges. It is the only profession
that is condemned in Scripture, and the one most in favour with
governments. Why, then, should we not be as indulgent to our erring
brethren as to the tax-gatherers?

The persecuting spirit further seeks a justification of itself in
the driving of the merchants from the temple and the sending of a
legion of demons from the body of a possessed man into the bodies of
two thousand unclean animals. But who can fail to see that these are
instances of the justice which God deigns to render to himself for
the contravention of his law? It was a lack of respect for the house
of the Lord to change its purview into a merchant’s shop. It is no
use saying that the Sanhedrim and the priests permitted this only
for the sake of the sacrifices. The God to whom the sacrifices were
made might assuredly destroy this profanation, though he was hidden
in a human form; he might also punish those who introduced into the
country such enormous herds of animals forbidden by a law which he
deigned to observe himself. These cases have no relation whatever to
persecution on account of dogma. The spirit of intolerance must be
very poor in argument to appeal to such foolish pretexts.

Nearly all the rest of the words and actions of Christ breathe
gentleness, patience, and indulgence. He does not even break out
against Judas, who must betray him; he commands Peter never to use
the sword; he reproaches the children of Zebedee, who, after the
example of Elias, wanted to bring fire from heaven on a town that
refused them shelter.

In the end Christ succumbed to the wicked. If one may venture to
compare the sacred with the profane--God with a man--his death,
humanly speaking, had some resemblance to the death of Socrates.
The Greek philosopher was a victim to the hatred of the sophists,
priests, and leaders of the people; the legislator of the Christians
was destroyed by the Scribes, Pharisees, and priests. Socrates might
have escaped death, and would not; Jesus Christ offered himself
voluntarily. The Greek philosopher not only pardoned his calumniators
and his wicked judges, but begged them to treat his children in the
same way if they should ever be so fortunate as, like himself, to
incur their hatred; the legislator of the Christians, infinitely
superior, begged his father to forgive his enemies.

If it be objected that, while Socrates was calm, Jesus Christ seemed
to fear death, and suffered such extreme anguish that he sweated
blood--the strongest and rarest symptom of fear--this was because
he deigned to stoop to all the weakness of the human body that he
had put on. His body trembled--his soul was invincible. He taught us
that true strength and grandeur consist in supporting the evils under
which our nature succumbs. It is a splendid act of courage to meet
death while you fear it.

Socrates had treated the sophists as ignorant men, and convinced them
of bad faith; Jesus, using his divine rights, treated the Scribes and
Pharisees as hypocrites, fools, blind and wicked men, serpents, and
vipers.

Need I now ask whether it is tolerance or intolerance that is of
divine right? If you wish to follow Jesus Christ, be martyrs, not
executioners.


        THE ONLY CASES IN WHICH INTOLERANCE IS HUMANLY LAWFUL

For a government to have the right to punish the errors of men it
is necessary that their errors must take the form of crime; they
do not take the form of crime unless they disturbed society; they
disturb society when they engender fanaticism; hence men must avoid
fanaticism in order to deserve toleration.

If a few young Jesuits, knowing that the Church has condemned the
Jansenists, proceed to burn a house of the Oratorian priests because
the Oratorian Quesnel was a Jansenist, it is clear that these Jesuits
ought to be punished.

Again, if the Jesuits have acted upon improper maxims, and their
institute is contrary to the laws of the kingdom, their society must
be dissolved, and the Jesuits must be abolished and turned into
citizens. The evil done to them is imaginary--the good is real. What
hardship is there in wearing a short coat instead of a long black
robe, and being free instead of being a slave?

If the Franciscan monks, carried away by a holy zeal for the Virgin
Mary, go and destroy a Dominican convent, because the Dominicans
believe that Mary was born in original sin, it will be necessary to
treat the Franciscans in much the same way as the Jesuits.

We may say the same of the Lutherans and Calvinists. It is useless
for them to say that they follow the promptings of their consciences,
that it is better to obey God than men, or that they are the true
flock, and must exterminate the wolves. In such cases they are wolves
themselves.

One of the most remarkable examples of fanaticism is found in a
small Danish sect, whose principle was excellent. They desired to
secure eternal salvation for their brethren; but the consequences
of the principle were peculiar. They knew that all infants which die
unbaptised are damned, and that those which are so fortunate as to
die immediately after baptism enjoy eternal glory. They therefore
proceeded to kill all the newly-baptised boys and girls that they
could find. No doubt this was a way of securing for them the highest
conceivable happiness and preserving them from the sin and misery of
this life. But these charitable folk forgot that it is not lawful
to do a little evil that a great good may follow; that they had no
right to the lives of these children; that the majority of parents
are carnal enough to prefer to keep their children rather than see
them slain in order to enter paradise; and that the magistrate has to
punish homicide, even when it is done with a good intention.

The Jews would seem to have a better right than any to rob and kill
us. Though there are a hundred instances of toleration in the Old
Testament, there are also some instances and laws of severity. God
has at times commanded them to kill idolaters, and reserve only the
marriageable girls. Now they regard us as idolaters, and, although we
tolerate them to-day, it is possible that, if they became masters,
they would suffer only our girls to live.

They would, at least, be absolutely compelled to slay all the Turks,
because the Turks occupy the lands of the Hittites, Jebusites,
Amorrhæans, Jersensæans, Hevæans, Aracæans, Cinæans, Hamatæans, and
Samaritans. All these peoples were anathematised, and their country,
which was more than seventy-five miles long, was given to the
Jews in several consecutive covenants. They ought to regain their
possessions, which the Mohammedans have usurped for the last thousand
years.

If the Jews were now to reason in this way, it is clear that the only
reply we should make would be to put them in the galleys.

These are almost the only cases in which intolerance seems reasonable.


             ACCOUNT OF A CONTROVERSIAL DISPUTE IN CHINA

In the early years of the reign of the great Emperor Kam-hi a
mandarin of the city of Canton heard from his house a great noise,
which proceeded from the next house. He inquired if anybody was
being killed, and was told that the almoner of the Danish missionary
society, a chaplain from Batavia, and a Jesuit were disputing. He had
them brought to his house, put tea and sweets before them, and asked
why they quarrelled.

The Jesuit replied that it was very painful for him, since he was
always right, to have to do with men who were always wrong; that he
had at first argued with the greatest restraint, but had at length
lost patience.

The mandarin, with the utmost discretion, reminded them that
politeness was needed in all discussion, told them that in China men
never became angry, and asked the cause of the dispute.

The Jesuit answered: “My lord, I leave it to you to decide. These two
gentlemen refuse to submit to the decrees of the Council of Trent.”

“I am astonished,” said the mandarin. Then, turning to the
refractory pair, he said: “Gentlemen, you ought to respect the
opinions of a large gathering. I do not know what the Council of
Trent is, but a number of men are always better informed than a
single one. No one ought to imagine that he is better than others,
and has a monopoly of reason. So our great Confucius teaches; and,
believe me, you will do well to submit to the Council of Trent.”

The Dane then spoke. “My lord speaks with the greatest wisdom,” he
said; “we respect great councils, as is proper, and therefore we are
in entire agreement with several that were held before the Council of
Trent.”

“Oh, if that is the case,” said the mandarin, “I beg your pardon.
You may be right. So you and this Dutchman are of the same opinion,
against this poor Jesuit.”

“Not a bit,” said the Dutchman. “This fellow’s opinions are almost
as extravagant as those of the Jesuit yonder, who has been so very
amiable to you. I can’t bear them.”

“I don’t understand,” said the mandarin. “Are you not all three
Christians? Have you not all three come to teach Christianity in our
empire? Ought you not, therefore, to hold the same dogmas?”

“It is this way, my lord,” said the Jesuit; “these two are mortal
enemies, and are both against me. Hence it is clear that they are
both wrong, and I am right.”

“That is not quite clear,” said the mandarin; “strictly speaking, all
three of you may be wrong. I should like to hear you all, one after
the other.”

The Jesuit then made a rather long speech, during which the Dane
and the Dutchman shrugged their shoulders. The mandarin did not
understand a word of it. Then the Dane spoke; the two opponents
regarded each other with pity, and the mandarin again failed to
understand. The Dutchman had the same effect. In the end they all
spoke together and abused each other roundly. The good mandarin
secured silence with great difficulty, and said: “If you want us
to tolerate your teaching here, begin by being yourselves neither
intolerant nor intolerable.”

When they went out the Jesuit met a Dominican friar, and told him
that he had won, adding that truth always triumphed. The Dominican
said: “Had I been there, you would not have won; I should have
convicted you of lying and idolatry.” The quarrel became warm, and
the Jesuit and Dominican took to pulling each other’s hair. The
mandarin, on hearing of the scandal, sent them both to prison. A
sub-mandarin said to the judge: “How long does your excellency wish
them to be kept in prison?” “Until they agree,” said the judge.
“Then,” said the sub-mandarin, “they are in prison for life.” “In
that case,” said the judge, “until they forgive each other.” “They
will never forgive each other,” said the other; “I know them.”
“Then,” said the mandarin, “let them stop there until they pretend to
forgive each other.”


     WHETHER IT IS USEFUL TO MAINTAIN THE PEOPLE IN SUPERSTITION

Such is the weakness, such the perversity, of the human race that
it is better, no doubt, for it to be subject to all conceivable
superstitions, provided they be not murderous, than to live
without religion. Man has always needed a curb; and, although it
was ridiculous to sacrifice to fauns or naiads, it was much more
reasonable and useful to worship these fantastic images of the deity
than to sink into atheism. A violent atheist would be as great a
plague as a violent superstitious man.

When men have not sound ideas of the divinity, false ideas will take
their place; just as, in ages of impoverishment, when there is not
sound money, people use bad coin. The pagan feared to commit a crime
lest he should be punished by his false gods; the Asiatic fears the
chastisement of his pagoda. Religion is necessary wherever there is a
settled society. The laws take care of known crimes; religion watches
secret crime.

But once men have come to embrace a pure and holy religion,
superstition becomes, not merely useless, but dangerous. We must not
feed on acorns those to whom God offers bread.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy--the mad
daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated
the earth.

When, in our ages of barbarism, there were scarcely two feudal lords
who had a New Testament in their homes, it might be pardonable to
press fables on the vulgar; that is to say, on these feudal lords,
their weak-minded wives, and their brutal vassals. They were led to
believe that St. Christopher had carried the infant Jesus across
a river; they were fed with stories of sorcery and diabolical
possession; they readily believed that St. Genou healed gout, and
St. Claire sore eyes. The children believed in the werewolf, and
their parents in the girdle of St. Francis. The number of relics was
incalculable.

The sediment of these superstitions remained among the people even
when religion had been purified. We know that when M. de Noailles,
Bishop of Chalons, removed and threw in the fire the pretended
relic of the sacred navel of Jesus Christ the town of Chalons took
proceedings against him. But his courage was equal to his piety, and
he succeeded in convincing the people that they could worship Jesus
Christ in spirit and truth without having his navel in their church.

The Jansenists contributed not a little gradually to root out from
the mind of the nation the false ideas that dishonoured the Christian
religion. People ceased to believe that it sufficed to pray for
thirty days to the Virgin to obtain all that they wished, and sin
with impunity.

In the end the citizens began to suspect that it was not really St.
Genevieve who gave or withheld rain, but God himself who disposed of
the elements. The monks were astonished to see that their saints no
longer worked miracles. If the writers of the life of St. Francis
Xavier returned to this world, they would not dare to say that the
saint raised nine people from the dead, that he was in two places at
the same time, and that, when his crucifix fell into the sea, a crab
restored it to him.

It is the same with excommunication. Historians tell us that when
King Robert had been excommunicated by Pope Gregory V., for marrying
his godmother, the Princess Bertha, his servants threw out of the
window the meat served up to the king, and Queen Bertha was delivered
of a goose in punishment of the incestuous marriage. I doubt if
in our time the waiters of the king of France would, if he were
excommunicated, throw his dinner out of the window, and whether the
queen would give birth to a gosling.

There remain, it is true, a few bigoted fanatics in the suburbs; but
the disease, like vermin, attacks only the lowest of the populace.
Every day reason penetrates farther into France, into the shops of
merchants as well as the mansions of lords. We must cultivate the
fruits of reason, the more willingly since it is now impossible to
prevent them from developing. France, enlightened by Pascal, Nicole,
Arnaud, Bossuet, Descartes, Gassendi, Bayle, Fontenelle, etc., cannot
be ruled as it was ruled in earlier times.

If the masters of error--the grand masters--so long paid and honoured
for brutalising the human species, ordered us to-day to believe
that the seed must die in order to germinate; that the earth stands
motionless on its foundations--that it does not travel round the sun;
that the tides are not a natural effect of gravitation; that the
rainbow is not due to the refraction and reflection of light, etc.,
and based their decrees on ill-understood passages of Scripture, we
know how they would be regarded by educated men. Would it be too
much to call them fools? And if these masters employed force and
persecution to secure the ascendancy of their insolent ignorance,
would it be improper to speak of them as wild beasts?

The more the superstitions of the monks are despised, the more
the bishops and priests are respected; while they do good, the
monkish superstitions from Rome do nothing but evil. And of all
these superstitions, is not the most dangerous that of hating one’s
neighbour on account of his opinions? And is it not evident that it
would be even more reasonable to worship the sacred navel, the sacred
prepuce, and the milk and dress of the Virgin Mary, than to detest
and persecute one’s brother?


                     VIRTUE BETTER THAN SCIENCE

The less we have of dogma, the less dispute; the less we have of
dispute, the less misery. If that is not true, I am wrong.

Religion was instituted to make us happy in this world and the next.
What must we do to be happy in the next world? Be just.[29] What must
we do to be happy in this world, as far as the misery of our nature
allows? Be indulgent.

It would be the height of folly to pretend to bring all men to have
the same thoughts in metaphysics. It would be easier to subdue the
whole universe by arms than to subdue all the minds in a single city.

Euclid easily persuaded all men of the truths of geometry. How?
Because every single one of them is a corollary of the axiom, “Two
and two make four.” It is not exactly the same in the mixture of
metaphysics and theology.

When Bishop Alexander and the priest Arius began [in the fourth
century] to dispute as to the way in which the Logos emanated from
the Father, the Emperor Constantine at first wrote to them as follows
(as we find in Eusebius and Socrates): “You are great fools to
dispute about things you do not understand.”

If the two parties had been wise enough to perceive that the emperor
was right, the Christian world would not have been stained with blood
for three hundred years.

What, indeed, can be more stupid and more horrible than to say to
men: “My friends, it is not enough to be loyal subjects, submissive
children, tender fathers, just neighbours, and to practise every
virtue, cultivate friendship, avoid ingratitude, and worship
Christ in peace; you must, in addition, know how one is engendered
from all eternity, and how to distinguish the _homoousion_ in the
_hypostasis_, or we shall condemn you to be burned for ever, and will
meantime put you to death”?

Had such a proposition been made to Archimedes, or Poseidonius, or
Varro, or Cato, or Cicero, what would he have said?

Constantine did not persevere in his resolution to impose silence
on the contending parties. He might have invited the leaders of the
pious frenzy to his palace and asked them what authority they had to
disturb the world: “Have you the title-deeds of the divine family?
What does it matter to you whether the Logos was made or engendered,
provided men are loyal to him, preach a sound morality, and practise
it as far as they can? I have done many wrong things in my time,
and so have you. You are ambitious, so am I. The empire has cost me
much knavery and cruelty; I have murdered nearly all my relatives. I
repent, and would expiate my crimes by restoring peace to the Roman
Empire. Do not prevent me from doing the only good that can efface
my earlier barbarity. Help me to end my days in peace.” Possibly he
would have had no influence on the disputants; possibly he would have
been flattered to find himself, in long red robe, his head covered
with jewels, presiding at a council.

Yet this it was that opened the gate to all the plagues that came
from Asia upon the West. From every disputed verse of Scripture there
issued a fury, armed with a sophism and a sword, that goaded men to
madness and cruelty. The marauding Huns and Goths and Vandals did
infinitely less harm; and the greatest harm they did was to join
themselves in these fatal disputes.


                       OF UNIVERSAL TOLERATION

One does not need great art and skilful eloquence to prove that
Christians ought to tolerate each other--nay, even to regard all
men as brothers. Why, you say, is the Turk, the Chinese, or the Jew
my brother? Assuredly; are we not all children of the same father,
creatures of the same God?

But these people despise us and treat us as idolaters. Very well; I
will tell them that they are quite wrong. It seems to me that I might
astonish, at least, the stubborn pride of a Mohammedan or a Buddhist
priest if I spoke to them somewhat as follows:

This little globe, which is but a point, travels in space like many
other globes; we are lost in the immensity. Man, about five feet
high, is certainly a small thing in the universe. One of these
imperceptible beings says to some of his neighbours, in Arabia or
South Africa: “Listen to me, for the God of all these worlds has
enlightened me. There are nine hundred million little ants like us on
the earth, but my ant-hole alone is dear to God. All the others are
eternally reprobated by him. Mine alone will be happy.”

They would then interrupt me, and ask who was the fool that talked
all this nonsense. I should be obliged to tell them that it was
themselves. I would then try to appease them, which would be
difficult.

I would next address myself to the Christians, and would venture
to say to, for instance, a Dominican friar--an inquisitor of the
faith: “Brother, you are aware that each province in Italy has its
own dialect, and that people do not speak at Venice and Bergamo as
they do at Florence. The Academy of La Crusca has fixed the language.
Its dictionary is a rule that has to be followed, and the grammar of
Matei is an infallible guide. But do you think that the consul of
the Academy, or Matei in his absence, could in conscience cut out
the tongues of all the Venetians and the Bergamese who persisted in
speaking their own dialect?”

The inquisitor replies: “The two cases are very different. In our
case it is a question of your eternal salvation. It is for your good
that the heads of the inquisition direct that you shall be seized
on the information of any one person, however infamous or criminal;
that you shall have no advocate to defend you; that the name of your
accuser shall not be made known to you; that the inquisitor shall
promise you pardon and then condemn you; and that you shall then be
subjected to five kinds of torture, and afterwards either flogged or
sent to the galleys or ceremoniously burned. On this Father Ivonet,
Doctor Chucalon, Zanchinus, Campegius, Royas, Telinus, Gomarus,
Diabarus, and Gemelinus are explicit, and this pious practice admits
of no exception.”[30]

I would take the liberty of replying: “Brother, possibly you are
right. I am convinced that you wish to do me good. But could I not be
saved without all that?”

It is true that these absurd horrors do not stain the face of the
earth every day; but they have often done so, and the record of them
would make up a volume much larger than the gospels which condemn
them. Not only is it cruel to persecute, in this brief life, those
who differ from us, but I am not sure if it is not too bold to
declare that they are damned eternally. It seems to me that it is
not the place of the atoms of a moment, such as we are, thus to
anticipate the decrees of the Creator. Far be it from me to question
the principle, “Out of the Church there is no salvation.” I respect
it, and all that it teaches; but do we really know all the ways of
God, and the full range of his mercies? May we not hope in him as
much as fear him? It is not enough to be loyal to the Church? Must
each individual usurp the rights of the Deity, and decide, before he
does, the eternal lot of all men?

When we wear mourning for a king of Sweden, Denmark, England, or
Prussia, do we say that we wear mourning for one who burns eternally
in hell? There are in Europe forty million people who are not of the
Church of Rome. Shall we say to each of them: “Sir, seeing that you
are infallibly damned, I will neither eat, nor deal, nor speak with
you”?

What ambassador of France, presented in audience to the Sultan,
would say in the depths of his heart: “His Highness will undoubtedly
burn for all eternity because he has been circumcised”? If he really
believed that the Sultan is the mortal enemy of God, the object of
his vengeance, could he speak to him? Ought he to be sent to him?
With whom could we have intercourse? What duty of civil life could
we ever fulfil if we were really convinced that we were dealing with
damned souls?

Followers of a merciful God, if you were cruel of heart; if, in
worshipping him whose whole law consisted in loving one’s neighbour
as oneself, you had burdened this pure and holy law with sophistry
and unintelligible disputes; if you had lit the fires of discord
for the sake of a new word or a single letter of the alphabet; if
you had attached eternal torment to the omission of a few words or
ceremonies that other peoples could not know, I should say to you:

“Transport yourselves with me to the day on which all men will be
judged, when God will deal with each according to his works. I see
all the dead of former ages and of our own stand in his presence.
Are you sure that our Creator and Father will say to the wise
and virtuous Confucius, to the lawgiver Solon, to Pythagoras, to
Zaleucus, to Socrates, to Plato, to the divine Antonines, to the
good Trajan, to Titus, the delight of the human race, to Epictetus,
and to so many other model men: “Go, monsters, go and submit to a
chastisement infinite in its intensity and duration; your torment
shall be as eternal as I. And you, my beloved, Jean Chatel,
Ravaillac, Damiens, Cartouche, etc. [assassins in the cause of the
Church], who have died with the prescribed formulæ, come and share my
empire and felicity for ever.”[31]

You shrink with horror from such sentiments; and, now that they have
escaped me, I have no more to say to you.




                           ON SUPERSTITION


MY BRETHREN:

You are aware that all prominent nations have set up a public cult.
Men have at all times assembled to deal with their interests and
communicate their needs, and it was quite natural that they should
open these meetings with some expression of the respect and love
which they owe to the author of their lives. This homage has been
compared to the respect which children pay to their father, and
subjects to their sovereign. These are but feeble images of the
worship of God. The relations of man to man have no proportion to the
relation of the creature to the Supreme Being; there is no affinity
between them. It would even be blasphemy to render homage to God in
the form of a monarch. A ruler of the whole earth--if there could
be such a person, and all men were so unhappy as to be subject to
one man--would be but a worm of the earth, commanding other worms
of the earth; he would still be infinitely lower than the Deity.
In republics, moreover, which are unquestionably earlier than any
monarchy, how could God be conceived in the shape of a king? If it
be necessary to represent God in any sensible form, the idea of a
father, defective as it is, would seem to be the best fitted to our
weakness.

But emblems of the Deity were one of the first sources of
superstition. As soon as we made God in our own image, the divine
cult was perverted. Having dared to represent God in the form of a
man, our wretched imagination, which never halts, ascribed to him all
the vices of a man. We regarded him only as a powerful master, and we
charged him with abuse of power; we described him as proud, jealous,
angry, vindictive, maleficent, capricious, pitilessly destructive,
a despoiler of some to enrich others, with no other reason but his
will. Our ideas are confined to the things about us; we conceive
hardly anything except by similitudes; and so, when the earth was
covered with tyrants, God was regarded as the first of tyrants. It
was much worse when the Deity was presented in emblems taken from
animals and plants. God became an ox, serpent, crocodile, ape, cat,
or lamb; bellowing, hissing, devouring, and being devoured.

The superstition of almost all nations has been so horrible that, did
not the monuments of it survive, it would be impossible to believe
the accounts of it. The history of the world is the history of
fanaticism.

Have there been innocent superstitions among the monstrous forms that
have covered the earth? Can we not distinguish between poisons which
have been used as remedies and poisons which have retained their
murderous nature? If I mistake not, here is an inquiry worth the
close attention of reasonable men.

A man does good to his fellows and brothers. One man destroys
carnivorous beasts; another invents arts by the force of his genius.
They are, on that account, regarded as higher in the favour of
God than other men, as children of God; they become demi-gods, or
secondary gods, when they die. They are proposed to other men, not
merely as models, but as objects of worship. He who worships Hercules
and Perseus is incited to imitate them. Altars are the reward of
genius and courage. I see in that only an error which leads to good.
In that case they are deceived to their own advantage. How could
we reproach the ancient Romans if they had raised to the rank of
secondary gods only such men as Scipio, Titus, Trajan, and Marcus
Aurelius?

There is an infinite distance between God and man. We agree; but
if, in the system of the ancients, the human soul was regarded as a
finite portion of the infinite intelligence, sinking back into the
great whole without adding to it; if it be supposed that God dwelt in
the soul of Marcus Aurelius, since his soul was superior to others in
virtue during life; why may we not suppose that it is still superior
when it is separated from its mortal body?

Our brothers of the Roman Catholic Church (for all men are brothers)
have filled heaven with demi-gods, which they call “saints.” Had
they always chosen them wisely, we may candidly allow that their
error would have been of service to human nature. We pour on them
our disdain only because they honour an Ignatius, the knight of the
Virgin, a Dominic, the persecutor, or a Francis, fanatical to the
pitch of madness, who goes naked, speaks to animals, catechises a
wolf, and makes himself a wife of snow. We cannot forgive Jerome,
the learned but faulty translator of the Jewish books, for having, in
his history of the fathers of the desert, demanded our respect for a
St. Pacomius, who paid his visits on the back of a crocodile. We are
especially angered when we see that Rome has canonised Gregory VII.,
the incendiary of Europe.

It is otherwise with the cult that is paid in France to King Louis
IX., who was just and courageous. If it is too much to invoke him,
it is not too much to revere him. It is but to say to other princes:
Imitate his virtues.

I go farther. Suppose there had been placed in some church the statue
of Henry IV., who won his kingdom with the valour of Alexander and
the clemency of Titus, who was good and compassionate, chose the best
ministers and was his own first minister; suppose that, in spite of
his weaknesses, he received a homage beyond the respect which we owe
to great men. What harm would be done? It would assuredly be better
to bend the knee before him than before this crowd of unknown saints,
whose very names have become a subject of opprobrium and ridicule. I
agree that it would be a superstition, but a superstition that could
do no harm; a patriotic enthusiasm, not a pernicious fanaticism. If
man is born to error, let us wish him virtuous errors.

The superstition that we must drive from the earth is that which,
making a tyrant of God, invites men to become tyrants. He who was the
first to say that we must detest the wicked put a sword in the hands
of all who dared to think themselves faithful. He who was the first
to forbid communication with those who were not of his opinion rang
the tocsin of civil war throughout the earth.

I believe what seems to reason impossible--in other words, I believe
what I do not believe--and therefore I must hate those who boast that
they believe an absurdity opposed to mine. Such is the logic--such,
rather, is the madness--of the superstitious. To worship, love, and
serve the Supreme Being, and to be of use to men, is nothing; it is
indeed, according to some, a false virtue, a “splendid sin,” as they
call it. Ever since men made it a sacred duty to dispute about what
they cannot understand, and made virtue consist in the pronunciation
of certain unintelligible words, which every one attempted to
explain, Christian countries have been a theatre of discord and
carnage.

You will tell me that this universal pestilence should be imputed
to the fury of ambition rather than to that of fanaticism. I answer
that it is due to both. The thirst for domination has been assuaged
with the blood of fools. I do not aspire to heal men of power of this
furious passion to subject the minds of others; it is an incurable
disease. Every man would like to see others hastening to serve him;
and, that he may be the better served, he will, if he can, make them
believe that their duty and their happiness are to be slaves. Find me
a man with an income of a hundred thousand pounds a year, and with
four or five hundred thousand subjects throughout Europe, who cost
him nothing, besides his soldiers, and tell him that Christ, of whom
he is the vicar and imitator, lived in poverty and humility. He will
reply that the times are changed, and to prove it he will condemn
you to perish in the flames. You will neither correct this man [the
Pope] nor a Cardinal de Lorraine, the simultaneous possessor of
seven bishoprics. What can one do, then? Appeal to the people, and,
brutalised as they are, they listen and half open their eyes. They
partly throw off the most humiliating yoke that has ever been borne.
They rid themselves of some of their errors, and win back a part of
their freedom, that appanage or essence of man of which they had been
robbed. We cannot cure the powerful of ambition, but we can cure the
people of superstition. We can, by speech and pen, make men more
enlightened and better.

It is easy to make them see what they have suffered during fifteen
hundred years. Few people read, but all may listen. Listen, then,
my brethren, and hear the calamities which have fallen on earlier
generations.

Hardly had the Christians, breathing freely under Constantine, dipped
their hands in the blood of the virtuous Valeria,[32] daughter,
wife, and mother of the Cæsars, and in the blood of her young son
Candidian, the hope of the Empire; hardly had they put to death the
son of the Emperor Maximin, in his eighth year, and his daughter
in her seventh year; hardly had these men, who are described as so
patient for two centuries, betrayed their fury at the beginning of
the fourth century, than controversy gave birth to those civil
discords which, succeeding each other without a moment of relaxation,
still agitate Europe. What are the subjects of these bloody quarrels?
Subtilties, my brethren, of which not a trace is to be found in the
Gospel. They would know whether the Son was engendered or made;
whether he was engendered in time or before time; whether he is
consubstantial with, or like, the Father; whether the divine “monad,”
as Athanasius puts it, is threefold in three hypostases; whether the
Holy Ghost was engendered, or proceeded; whether he proceeds from the
Father only, or the Father and the Son; whether Jesus had one will or
two, or two natures, or one or two persons.

In a word, from “consubstantiality” to “transubstantiation”--terms
equally difficult to pronounce and to understand--everything has been
a matter of dispute, and every dispute has caused torrents of blood
to flow.

You know how much was shed by our superstitious Mary, daughter of
the tyrant Henry VIII., and worthy spouse of the Spanish tyrant
Philip II. The throne of Charles I. became a scaffold; he perished
ignominiously, after more than two hundred thousand men had been
slaughtered for a liturgy.

You know the civil wars of France. A troop of fanatical theologians,
called the Sorbonne, declare Henry III. to have forfeited the throne,
and at once a theological apprentice assassinates him. The Sorbonne
declares the great Henry IV., our ally, incapable of ruling, and
twenty murderers rise in succession; until at last, on the mere
announcement that the hero is about to protect his former allies
against the Pope’s followers, a monk--a schoolmaster--plunges a knife
in the heart of the most valiant of kings and best of men in the
midst of his capital, under the eyes of his people, and in the arms
of his friends. And, by an inconceivable contradiction, his memory
is revered for ever, and the troop of the Sorbonne which proscribed
and excommunicated him and his faithful subjects, and has no right to
excommunicate anybody, still survives, to the shame of France.

It is not the ordinary people, my brethren, not the agricultural
workers and the ignorant and peaceful artisans, who have raised these
ridiculous and fatal quarrels, the sources of so many horrors and
parricides. There is, unhappily, not one of them that is not due to
the theologians. Men fed by your labours in a comfortable idleness,
enriched by your sweat and your misery, struggled for partisans and
slaves; they inspired you with a destructive fanaticism, that they
might be your masters; they made you superstitious, not that you
might fear God the more, but that you might fear them.

The gospel did not say to James, Peter, or Bartholomew: “Live in
opulence; deck yourselves with honours; walk amid a retinue of
guards.” It did not say to them: “Disturb the world with your
incomprehensible questions.” Jesus, my brethren, touched none of
these questions. Would you be better theologians than he whom you
recognise as your one master? What! He said to you: “All consists in
loving God and your neighbour”; yet you would seek something else.

Is there any one among you, is there any one on the whole earth, who
can think that God will examine him on points of theology, not judge
him by his deeds?

What is a theological opinion? It is an idea that may be true or
false; but morality has no interest in it. It is clear that you
should be virtuous, whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father
by spiration, or from the Father and the Son. It is not less clear
that you will never understand any proposition of this nature. You
will never have the least idea how Jesus could have two natures and
two wills in one person. If he had wished you to know it, he would
have told you of it. I choose these examples among a hundred others,
and I pass in silence over other controversies in order that I may
not reopen wounds that still bleed.

God has given you understanding; he cannot wish that you should
pervert it. How could a proposition of which you can never have an
idea be necessary to you? It is a fact of daily experience that God,
who gives everything, has given one man more light and more talent
than another. It does not offend our good sense that he has chosen to
link one man more closely to himself than others; that he has made
him a model of reason or virtue. No one can deny that it is possible
for God to shower his finest gifts on one of his works. We may,
therefore, believe in Jesus as one who taught and practised virtue;
but let us take care that in wishing to go too far beyond that, we do
not overturn the whole structure.

The superstitious man puts poison in the most wholesome food; he is
an enemy to himself and others. He believes himself the object of
eternal vengeance if he eats meat on a certain day; he believes that
a long, grey robe, with a pointed hood and a long beard, is much more
agreeable to God than a shaven face and a head that retains its hair;
he imagines that his salvation is bound up with certain Latin formulæ
which he does not understand. He has educated his daughter in these
principles. She buries herself in a dungeon as soon as she reaches a
marriageable age; she betrays posterity to please God--more guilty,
in regard to the human race, than the Hindoo widow, who casts herself
on her husband’s pyre after bearing him children.

Monks of the southern parts of Europe, self-condemned to a life
that is as abject as it is frightful, do not compare yourselves to
the penitents of the banks of the Ganges; your austerities do not
approach their voluntary sufferings. And think not that God approves
in you what you say he condemns in them.

The superstitious man is his own executioner; and he is the
executioner of all who do not agree with him. The most infamous
informing he calls “fraternal correction.” He accuses the simple
innocence that is not on its guard, and, in the candour of its heart,
has not set a seal upon its lips. He denounces it to those tyrants of
souls who laugh alike at the accused and the accuser.

Lastly, the superstitious man becomes a fanatic, and then his zeal
becomes capable of all crimes in the name of the Lord.

We live no longer, it is true, in those abominable days when
relatives and friends slaughtered each other, when a hundred battles
covered the earth with corpses for the sake of some argument of the
school; but a few sparks spring every day from the ashes of these
vast conflagrations. Princes no longer march to the field at the
voice of priests and monks; but citizens persecute each other still
in the heart of the towns, and private life is often poisoned with
superstition. What would you say of a family whose members were ever
ready to fight each other in order to settle in what way their father
must be saluted? My friends, the great thing is to love him; you may
salute him as you will. Are you brothers only to be divided? Must
that which should unite you be always a thing to separate you?

I know not of a single civil war among the Turks on the ground
of religion. I say “civil war”; but history tells of no sedition
or trouble among them that was due to controversy. Is it because
they have fewer pretexts for disputes? Is it because they are by
birth less restless and wiser than we? They ask not to what sect
you belong, provided that you pay regularly the slight tax. Latin
Christians and Greek Christians, Jacobites, Monothelites, Copts, or
Protestants--all are welcome to them; whereas there are not three
Christian nations that practise this humanity.

Jesus, my brethren, was not superstitious or intolerant; he said not
a single word against the cult of the Romans, who surrounded his
country. Let us imitate his indulgence, and deserve to experience it
from others.

Let us not be disturbed by the barbaric argument that is often used.
I will give it in its full strength:

“You believe that a good man may find favour in the eyes of the
being of beings, the God of justice and mercy, at any time, in any
place, in whatever religion he has spent his short life. We, on the
contrary, say that a man cannot please God unless he be born among
us, or taught by us. It is proved to us that we are the only persons
in the world who are right. We know that, although God came upon the
earth and died for all men, he will nevertheless show pity only to
our little gathering, and that even among us there are very few who
will escape eternal torment. Adopt the safer side, then. Enter our
little body, and strive to be one of the elect among us.”

Let us thank our brethren who use this language. Let us congratulate
them on being so sure that all in the world are damned except a few
of themselves; and let us conclude that our sect is better than
theirs by the very fact that it is more reasonable and humane. The
man who says to me, “Believe as I do, or God will damn thee,” will
presently say, “Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate thee.” Let
us pray God to soften these atrocious hearts and inspire all his
children with a feeling of brotherhood. We live in an island in
which the episcopal sect dominates from Dover to the Tweed.[33] From
there to the last of the Orkneys presbyterianism holds the field,
and beside these dominant religions are ten or a dozen others. Go to
Italy, and you will find papal despotism on the throne. In France it
is otherwise; France is already regarded by Rome as half-heretical.
Pass to Switzerland and Germany. You sleep to-night in a Calvinistic
town, to-morrow night in a Papist town, and the following night in a
Lutheran. You go on to Russia, and find nothing of all this. It is
a different sect. The court is illumined by an empress-philosopher.
The august Catherine has put reason on the throne, with magnificence
and generosity: but the people of her provinces detest alike the
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Papists. They would not eat, nor drink
in the same glass, with any of them. I ask you, my brethren, what
would happen if, in an assembly of all these sectaries, each thought
himself authorised by the divine spirit to secure the triumph of his
opinions? See you not the swords drawn, the gibbets raised, the fires
lit, from one end of Europe to the other? Who is right in this chaos
of disputes? Surely the tolerant and beneficent. Do not say that in
preaching tolerance we preach indifference. No, my brethren, he who
worships God and serves men is not indifferent. The name is more
fitting for the superstitious who thinks that God will be pleased
with him for uttering unintelligible formulæ, while he is really
very indifferent to the lot of his brother, whom he leaves to perish
without aid, or abandons in disgrace, or flatters in prosperity, or
persecutes if he is of another sect, unsupported and unprotected.
The more the superstitious man concentrates upon absurd beliefs
and practices, the more indifferent he becomes to the real needs
of humanity. Let us remember one of our charitable compatriots.
He founded a hospital for old men in his province. He was asked if
it was for Papists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Socinians,
Anabaptists, Methodists, or Memnonists? He answered: For men.

O God, keep from us the error of atheism which denies thy existence,
and deliver us from the superstition that outrages thy existence and
fills ours with horror.




             ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT


MY BRETHREN:

Books rule the world, or, at least, those nations in it which
have written language; the others do not count. The Zend Avesta,
attributed to the first Zoroaster, was the law of the Persians. The
Veda and the Shastabad are the law of the Brahmans. The Egyptians
were ruled by the books of Thot, who has been called “the first
Mercury.” The Koran holds sway to-day over Africa, Egypt, Arabia,
India, part of Tartary, the whole of Persia, Scythia, Asia Minor,
Syria, Thrace, Thessaly, and the whole of Greece as far as the strait
which separates Naples and the Empire.[34] The Pentateuch controls
the Jews; and, by a singular dispensation of Providence, it rules us
to-day. It is, therefore, our duty to read this work together, since
it is the foundation of our faith.

When we read the early chapters of the Pentateuch, we must remember
that, in speaking thus to the Jews, God deigned to accommodate
himself to their intelligence, which was still very crude. It is
well known to-day that our earth is but a point in comparison with
the space which we, improperly, call the heavens, in which shine a
prodigious number of stars, with planets far superior to ours. We
know that light was not made before the day, and that it comes to us
from the sun. We know that the supposed solid expanse between the
upper and the lower waters, which is called the “firmament,”[35] is
an error of ancient physics, adopted by the Greeks. But as God was
speaking to the Jews, he deigned to stoop low enough to adopt their
language. Certainly no one would have understood him in the desert
of Horeb if he had said: “I have put the sun in the centre of your
world; the little globe of the earth revolves, with other planets,
round this great star, which illumines the planets; and the moon
turns round the earth in the course of a month. Those other stars
which you see are so many suns, presiding over other worlds.”

If the eternal geometrician had spoken thus, he would indeed have
spoken worthily, as a master who knows his own work; but no Jew would
have understood a word of such sublime truths. The Jewish people were
stiff of neck and hard of understanding. It was necessary to give
coarse food to a coarse people, which could find sustenance only
in such food. It seems that this first chapter of _Genesis_ was an
allegory presented to them by the Holy Spirit, to be interpreted some
day by those whom God would deign to fill with his light. That, at
least, was the idea of the leading Jews, since it was forbidden to
read this book before reaching one’s twenty-fifth year, in order that
the mind of young folk might be prepared by masters to read it with
more intelligence and respect.

These doctors taught that, in the literal sense, the Nile, Euphrates,
Tigris, and Araxes did not really rise in the terrestrial paradise;
but that the four rivers, which watered it, evidently meant four
virtues necessary to man. It was, according to them, clear that the
formation of woman from the rib of man was a most striking allegory
of the unvarying harmony that ought to be found in marriage; that
the souls of married people ought to be united like their bodies. It
is a symbol of the peace and fidelity that ought to rule in conjugal
society.

The serpent that seduced Eve, and was the most cunning of all animals
on the earth, is, if we are to believe Philo and other writers, a
figurative expression of our corrupt desires. The use of speech,
which Scripture assigns to it, is the voice of our passions speaking
to our hearts. God used the allegory of the serpent because it was
very common in the East. The serpent was considered subtle because
it quickly escapes those who pursue it, and skilfully falls on those
who attack it. Its change of skin was the symbol of immortality.
The Egyptians carried a silver serpent in their processions. The
Phœnicians, who were neighbours of the Hebrews, had long had an
allegorical fable of a serpent that had made war on God and man. In
fine, the serpent which tempted Eve has been recognised as the devil,
who is ever seeking to tempt and undo us.

It is true that the idea of a devil falling from heaven and becoming
the enemy of the human race was known to the Jews only in the course
of time; but the divine author, who knew that this idea would spread
some day, deigned to plant the seed of it in the early chapters of
_Genesis_.

We really know nothing of the fall of the wicked angels except from
these few words in the Epistle of St. Jude: “Wandering stars, to
whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever, of whom Enoch
also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied.” It has been thought that
these wandering stars were the angels transformed into malevolent
demons, and we supply the place of the prophecies of Enoch, the
seventh man after Adam, which we no longer have. But no matter into
what labyrinth learned men may wander, in trying to explain these
incomprehensible things, we must always understand in an edifying
sense whatever we cannot understand literally.

The ancient Brahmans, as we said, had this theology many centuries
before the Jewish nation came into existence. The ancient Persians
had given names to the devils long before the Jews did so. You are
aware that in the Pentateuch we do not find the name of any angel,
good or bad. There is no mention of Gabriel, or Raphael, or Satan, or
Asmodeus in the Jewish books until long afterwards, when the little
people had learned their names during the Babylonian captivity [or
the Persian domination]. That shows, at least, that the doctrine
of celestial and infernal beings was common to all great nations.
You will find it in the book of _Job_, a precious monument of
antiquity. Job is an Arabic character; if the allegory was written
in Arabic. There are still, in the Hebrew translation, purely Arabic
phrases.[36] Here, then, we have the Hindoos, Persians, Arabs, and
Jews successively adopting much the same theology. It is therefore
entitled to close attention.

But what is even more clearly entitled to our attention is the
morality that ought to result from all this ancient theology. Men,
who are not born to be murderers, since God has not armed them like
lions and tigers; who are not born to be imposed upon, since they all
necessarily love truth; who are not born to be marauding brigands,
since God has given equally to them all the fruits of the earth and
the wool of the sheep; but who have, nevertheless, become marauders,
perjurers, and murderers, are really angels transformed into demons.

Let us, my brethren, always seek in Holy Writ what morality, not what
physics, teaches.

Let the ingenious Father Calmet employ his profound sagacity and
penetrating logic in discovering the place of the earthly paradise;
we may be content to deserve, if we can, the heavenly paradise by the
practice of justice, toleration, and kindliness.

“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not
eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
die” (_Gen._, ii., 17).

Interpreters admit that we do not know of any tree that gives
knowledge. Adam did not die on the day on which he ate of it; he
lived for nine hundred and thirty years afterwards, the Scripture
says. But, alas, what are nine hundred years between two eternities!
They are not to be compared with a moment of time, and our days pass
like the shadow. Does not this allegory, however, clearly teach us
that knowledge, wrongly understood, is able to undo us? The tree of
knowledge bears, no doubt, very bitter fruit, since so many learned
theologians have been persecutors or persecuted, and many have died
a dreadful death. Ah, my brethren, the Holy Spirit wished to show us
how dangerous false science is, how it puffs up the heart, and how
absurd a learned doctor often is.

It is from this passage that St. Augustine gathered the guilt of all
men on account of the disobedience of the first man. He it is who
developed the doctrine of original sin. Whether the stain of this sin
corrupted our bodies, or steeped the souls which enter them, is an
entirely incomprehensible mystery; it warns us at least not to live
in crime, if we were born in crime.

“And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill
him” (_Gen._ iv.).

Here, especially, my brethren, the fathers are opposed to each other.
The family of Adam was not yet numerous; Scripture gives him no other
children than Abel and Cain, at the time when the former was murdered
by his brother. Why is God forced to give Cain a safeguard against
any who may find him? Let us be content to observe that God pardons
Cain, no doubt after filling him with remorse. Let us profit by the
lesson, and not condemn our brethren to frightful torments for small
causes. When God is so merciful as to forgive an abominable murder,
we may imitate him. The objection is raised that the same God who
pardons a cruel murderer damns all men for ever for the transgression
of Adam, whose only crime was to eat the forbidden fruit. To our
feeble human reason it seems unjust for God to punish eternally all
the children of the guilty, not indeed to atone for a murder, but
to expiate what seems an excusable act of disobedience. This is
said to be an intolerable contradiction, which we cannot admit in
an infinitely good being; but it is only an apparent contradiction.
God hands us over, with our parents and children, to the flames for
the disobedience of Adam; but four thousand years afterwards he
sends Jesus Christ to deliver us, and he preserves the life of Cain
in order to people the earth: thus he remains in all things the God
of justice and mercy. St. Augustine calls Adam’s sin a “fortunate
fault”; but that of Cain was still more fortunate, since God took
care himself to put a mark of his protection on him.

“A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou
finish it above,” etc. (_Gen._ vi. 16).

Here we reach the greatest of all miracles, before which reason
must humble itself and the heart must break. We know with what bold
contempt the incredulous rise against the prodigy of a universal
deluge.

It is fruitless for them to object that in the wettest years we do
not get thirty inches of rain; that even in such a year there are as
many regions without rain as there are flooded regions; that the
law of gravity prevents the ocean from overflowing its bounds; that
if it covered the earth it would leave its bed dry; that, even if it
covered the earth, it could not rise fifteen cubits above the highest
mountains; that the animals could not reach the ark from America and
southern lands; that seven pairs of clean animals and two pairs of
unclean could not have been put in twenty arks; that these twenty
arks would not have sufficed to hold the fodder they needed, not
merely for ten months, but for the following year, in which the earth
would be too sodden to produce; that the carnivorous animals would
have died of starvation; that the eight persons in the ark would not
have been able to give the animals their food every day. There is
no end to their difficulties. But the whole of them are solved by
pointing out that this great event was a miracle--that puts an end to
all dispute.

“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose
top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (_Gen._ xi. 4).

Unbelievers declare that it is possible to make a name, yet be
scattered abroad. They ask if men have ever been so stupid as to wish
to build a tower as high as the heavens. They say that such a tower
would rise into the atmosphere, and that, if you call the atmosphere
the heavens, the tower will necessarily be in the heavens if it were
no more than twenty feet high; and that, if all men then spoke the
same tongue, the wisest thing they could do would be to gather in a
common city and prevent a corruption of their tongue. Apparently
they were all in their own country, since they were all agreed to
build therein. To drive them from their country is tyrannical; to
make them suddenly speak new tongues is absurd. Hence, they say,
we can only regard the story of the tower of Babel as an oriental
romance.

I reply to this blasphemy that, since the miracle is described by
an author who has recorded so many other miracles, it ought to be
believed, like the others. The works of God cannot be expected to
resemble the works of man in any way. The ages of the patriarchs
and prophets can have no relation to the ages of ordinary men. God
now comes upon the earth no more; but in those days he often came
down to carry out his work in person. It is a tradition of all the
great nations of antiquity. The Greeks, who had no knowledge of the
Jewish books until long after they had been translated into Greek
at Alexandria by Hellenising Jews, had believed, before Homer and
Hesiod, that the great Zeus and all the other gods came down from
the upper air to visit the earth. What lesson may we derive from the
general acceptance of this idea? That we are always in the presence
of God, and that we must engage in no deed or thought that is not in
accord with his justice. In a word, the tower of Babel is no more
extraordinary than all the rest. The book is equally authentic in all
its parts; we cannot deny one fact without denying all the others. We
must bring our proud reason into subjection, whether we regard the
story as literally true or as a figure.

“In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying: Unto
thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the
great river, the river Euphrates” (_Gen._ xv., 18).

Unbelievers exclaim triumphantly that the Jews have never owned
more than a part of what God promised them. They even think it
unjust that the Lord gave them this part. They say that the Jews had
not the least right to it; that the former journey of a Chaldæan
into a barbaric country could not possibly be a legitimate pretext
for invading the country; and that any man who declared himself a
descendant of St. Patrick, and came on that account to sack Ireland,
saying that he had God’s order to do so, would meet with a warm
reception. But let us always remember that the times have changed.
Let us respect the books of the Jews, and take care not to imitate
the Jews. God enjoins no longer what he once commanded.

They ask who this Abraham is, and why the Jewish people is traced
to the Chaldæan son of an idolatrous potter, who had no relation to
the people of the land of Canaan, and could not understand their
language. This Chaldæan, accompanied by a wife who bends under the
weight of years, but is still good, reaches Memphis. Why do the
couple pass from Memphis to the desert of Gerar? How comes there to
be a king in this horrible desert? How is it that the king of Egypt
and the king of Gerar both fall in love with the aged[37] spouse of
Abraham? These are but historical difficulties; the great thing is
to obey God. Holy Scripture always represents Abraham as unreservedly
submissive to the will of the Most High. Let us imitate him, and not
dispute so much.

“And there came two angels to Sodom at even,” etc. (_Gen._ xix.).

Here is a stumbling-block for all readers who listen only to their
own reason. Two angels--that is to say, two spiritual creatures, two
heavenly ministers of God--have earthly bodies, and inspire a whole
town, even its old men, with infamous desires; a father of a family
prostitutes his two daughters to save the honour of the two angels;
a town is changed into a lake of fire; a woman is transformed into
a salt statue; two girls deceive and intoxicate their father in
order to commit incest with him, lest, they say, their race should
perish, while they have all the inhabitants of the town of Zoar to
choose from! All these events, taken together, make up a revolting
picture. But if we are reasonable we shall agree with St. Clement of
Alexandria and the fathers who have followed him that the whole is
allegorical.

Let us remember that that was the way of writing in the East.
Parables were so constantly used that even the author of all truth
spoke to the Jews only in parables when he came on earth.

Parables make up the whole of the profane theology of antiquity.
Saturn devouring his children is evidently time destroying its own
works. Minerva is wisdom; she is formed in the head of the master
of the gods. The arrows and bandage of Cupid are obvious figures.
The fall of Phaëthon is an admirable symbol of ambition. All is not
allegory, either in the pagan theology or in the sacred history of
the Jewish people. The fathers distinguish between what is purely
historical and purely parabolical, and what partakes of the nature of
each. It is, I grant, difficult to walk on these slippery paths; but
if we walk in the way of virtue, why need we concern ourselves about
that of science?

The crime that God punishes here is horrible; let that suffice us.
Lot’s wife was changed into a salt statue for looking behind her. Let
us curb the impulses of curiosity; in a word, let the stories of Holy
Writ serve to make us better, if they do not make us more enlightened.

There are, it seems to me, my brethren, two kinds of figurative and
mystic interpretation of the Scriptures. The first, and incomparably
the better, is to gather from all facts counsels for the conduct
of life. If Jacob cruelly wrongs his brother Esau and deceives his
father-in-law Laban, let us keep peace in our families and act
justly towards our relatives. If the patriarch Reuben dishonours his
father’s bed, let us regard the incest with horror. If the patriarch
Judah commits a still more odious incest with his daughter-in-law
Thamar, let us all the more detest these iniquities. When David
ravishes the wife of Uriah, and has the husband slain; when Solomon
murders his brother; when we find that nearly all the petty kings
of the Jews are murderous barbarians, let us mend our ways as we
read this awful list of crimes. Let us read the whole Bible in this
spirit. It discomposes the man who would be learned; it consoles the
man who is content to be good.

The other way to detect the hidden meaning of the Scriptures is to
regard each event as an historical and physical emblem. That was the
method followed by St. Clement, the great Origen, the respectable St.
Augustine, and so many other fathers. According to them, the piece of
red cloth which the harlot Rahab hung from her window is the blood
of Jesus Christ. Moses spreading out his arms foreshadows the sign
of the cross. Judah tying his ass to a vine prefigures the entrance
of Christ into Jerusalem. St. Augustine compares the ark of Noah to
Jesus. St. Ambrose, in the seventh book of his _De Arca_, says that
the making of the little door in the side of the ark signifies, or
may be regarded as signifying, a part of the human body. Even if all
these interpretations were true, what profit should we derive from
them? Will men be juster from knowing what the little door of the ark
means? This way of interpreting the Holy Scripture is but a subtlety
of the mind, and it may injure the innocence of the heart.

Let us set aside all the subjects of contention which divide
nations, and fill ourselves with the sentiments which unite them.
Submission to God, resignation, justice, kindness, compassion, and
tolerance--those are the great principles. May all the theologians
of the earth live together as men of business do. Asking not of
what country a man is, nor in what practices he was reared, they
observe towards each other the inviolable rules of equity, fidelity,
and mutual confidence; and by these principles they bind nations
together. But those who know only their own opinions, and condemn
all others; those who think that the light shines for them alone,
and all other men walk in darkness; those who scruple to communicate
with foreign religions, should surely be entitled enemies of the
human race.

I will not conceal from you that the most learned men affirm that
the Pentateuch was not written by Moses. The great Newton, who alone
discovered the first principle of nature and the nature of light,
the astounding genius who penetrated so deep into ancient history,
attributes the Pentateuch to Samuel. Other distinguished scholars
think that it was written in the time of Osias by the scribe Saphan;
others believe that Esdras wrote it, on returning from the Captivity.
All are agreed, together with certain modern Jews, that the work was
not written by Moses.

This great objection is not as formidable as it seems. We assuredly
respect the Decalogue, from whatever hand it came. We dispute about
the date of several laws which some attribute to Edward III., others
to Edward II.; but we do not hesitate to adopt the laws, because we
perceive that they are just and useful. Even if those statements in
the preamble that are called in question are rejected, we do not
reject the law.

Let us always distinguish between dogma and history, and between
dogma and that eternal morality which all legislators have taught and
all peoples received.

O holy morality! O God who has created it! I will not confine you
within the bounds of a province. You reign over all thinking and
sentient beings. You are the God of Jacob; but you are the God of
the universe.

I cannot end this discourse, my dear brethren, without speaking to
you of the prophets. This is one of the large subjects on which our
enemies think to confound us. They say that in ancient times every
people had its prophets, diviners, or seers. But does it follow that
because the Egyptians, for instance, formerly had false prophets
the Jews may not have had true prophets? It is said that they had
no mission, no rank, no legal authorisation. That is true; but may
they not have been authorised by God? They anathematised each other,
and treated each other as rogues and fools; the prophet Zedekiah
even dared to strike the prophet Michah in the presence of King
Josaphat. We do not deny it; the Paralipomena record the fact. But is
a ministry less holy because the ministers disgrace it? Have not our
priests done things a hundred times worse than the giving of blows?

The commandments of God to the prophets Ezekiel and Hosea scandalise
those who think themselves wise. Will they not be wiser if they see
that these are allegories, types, parables, in accordance with the
ways of the Israelites? And that we have no more right to ask of God
an account of the orders he gives in accordance with these ways than
to ask the people why they have them? No doubt God could not order a
prophet to commit debauch and adultery; but he wished to let us see
that he disapproved the crimes and adulteries of his chosen people.
If we did not read the Bible in this spirit, we should, alas, be
filled with horror and indignation at every page.

Let us find edification in what scandalises others; let us find
wholesome food in their poison. When the proper and literal meaning
of a passage seems to be in accord with reason, let us keep to it.
When it seems to be contrary to the truth or to sound morals, let us
seek a hidden meaning that may reconcile truth and sound morals with
Holy Scripture. Thus have all the fathers of the Church proceeded;
thus do we proceed daily in the commerce of life. We always interpret
favourably the discourses of our friends and partisans. Would we
treat more harshly the sacred books of the Jews, which are the object
of our faith? Let us, in fine, read the Jews’ books that we may be
Christians; and if they make us not more wise, let them at least make
us better.




             ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT


MY BRETHREN:

There are in the New Testament, as there are in the Old, depths that
we cannot sound, and sublimities that our poor reason can never
attain. I do not propose here either to reconcile the gospels,
which seem to contradict each other at times, or to explain
mysteries which, by the very fact that they are mysteries, must be
inexplicable. Let those who are more learned than I discuss whether
the Holy Family betook itself to Egypt after the massacre of the
children at Bethlehem, as Matthew says, or remained in Judæa, as Luke
says; let them seek if the father of Joseph was named Jacob, his
grandfather Matthan, and his great-grandfather Eleazar, or if his
great-grandfather was Levi, his grandfather Matthat, and his father
Heli. Let them settle this genealogical tree according to their
light; it is a study that I respect. I know not if it would enlighten
my mind, but I do know that it cannot speak to my heart. Paul the
Apostle tells us himself, in his first epistle to Timothy, that we
must not trouble ourselves about genealogies. We will not be any
the better for knowing precisely who were the ancestors of Joseph,
in what year Jesus was born, and whether James was his brother or
his cousin. What will it profit us to consult what remains of the
Roman annals to see if Augustus really did order a census of all the
peoples of the earth when Mary was pregnant with Jesus, Quirinus
governor of Syria, and Herod king of Judæa? Quirinus, whom Luke calls
Cyrenius, was (the learned say) not governor in the time of Herod,
but of Archelaus, ten years later; and Augustus never ordered a
census of the Roman Empire.

We are told that the _Epistle to the Hebrews_, attributed to Paul,
was not written by Paul; that neither _Revelation_ nor the _Gospel
of John_ was written by John; that the first chapter of this gospel
was evidently written by a Greek Platonist; that the book could not
possibly come from a Jew; and that no Jew could ever have made Jesus
say: “I give you a new commandment: that you love each other.” This
commandment, they say, was certainly not new. It is given expressly,
and in even stronger terms, in the laws of _Leviticus_: “Thou shalt
love thy God above all things, and thy neighbour as thyself.” Such
a man as Jesus Christ--a man learned in the law, who confounded the
doctors at the age of twelve, and was ever speaking of the law--could
not be ignorant of the law; and his beloved disciple could not
possibly have charged him with so palpable a mistake.

Let us not be troubled, my brethren. Let us remember that Jesus
spoke a dialect, half Syrian and half Phœnician, that was hardly
intelligible to Greeks; that we have the _Gospel of John_ only in
Greek; that this gospel was written more than fifty years after
the death of Jesus; that the copyists may easily have altered the
text; and that it is more probable that the text ran, “I give you a
commandment that is not new,” than that it said: “I give you a new
commandment.” Let us return to our great principle. The precept is
good; it is our duty to fulfil it as well as we may, whether or no
Zoroaster was the first to announce it, and Moses copied it, and
Jesus renewed it.

Shall we penetrate into the thickest darkness of antiquity to learn
whether the darkness which covered the whole earth at the death
of Jesus was due to an eclipse of the sun at a time of full moon,
whether an astronomer named Phlegon, whom we have no longer, spoke
of this phenomenon, or if any one ever saw the star of the three
wise men? These are difficulties that may very well interest an
antiquarian; but he will not have spent in good works the precious
time he devotes to the clearing-up of this chaos; and he will end
with more doubt than piety. My brethren, the man who shares his bread
with the poor is better than he who has compared the Hebrew text with
the Greek, and both of them with the Samaritan.

All that relates to history only gives rise to a thousand disputes;
what concerns our duties gives rise to none. You will never
understand how the devil took God into the desert; how he tempted
him for forty days; or how he carried him to the top of a hill from
which he could see all the kingdoms of the world. The devil offering
all these things to God will greatly shock you. You will seek the
mystery that is hidden in these things, and so many others, and your
mind will be fatigued in vain. Every word will plunge you into
uncertainty, and the anguish of a restless curiosity which can never
be satisfied. But if you confine your attention to morals the storm
will pass, and you will rest in the bosom of virtue.

I venture to flatter myself, my brethren, that if the greatest
enemies of the Christian religion were to listen to us in this
secluded temple, in which the love of virtue brings us together; if
Lord Herbert, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Bolingbroke, Tindal, Toland,
Collins, Whiston, Trenchard, Gordon, and Swift were to witness our
gentle and innocent simplicity, they would have less disdain and
repugnance for us. They cease not to reproach us with an absurd
fanaticism. We are not fanatical in belonging to the religion of
Jesus. He worshipped one God, as we do; he despised empty ceremonies,
as we do. No gospel has said that his mother was the mother of God,
or that he was consubstantial with God. In no gospel will you find
that the disciples of Jesus should arrogate the title of “Holy
Father,” or “My Lord,” or that a priest who lives at Lambeth should
have an income of two thousand a year while so many useful tillers
of the soil have hardly the seed for the three or four acres they
water with their tears. The gospel did not say to the bishops of
Rome: Forge a donation of Constantine in order to seize the city of
the Scipios and Cæsars and become sovereigns of Naples. It did not
urge the bishops of Germany to profit by a time of anarchy to invade
half of Germany. Jesus was a poor man preaching to the poor. What
should we say of the followers of Penn and Fox, those enemies of
pomp and friends of peace, if they bore golden mitres on their heads
and were surrounded by soldiers; if they grasped the substance of the
peoples; if they would give orders to kings; if their satellites,
with executioners in their train, were to cry out at the top of their
voices, “Foolish nations, believe in Fox and Penn, or you will die in
torment”?

You know better than I what a fatal contrast the ages have witnessed
between the humility of Jesus and the pride of those who have assumed
his name; between their avarice and his poverty, their debauches and
his chastity, his submissiveness and their bloody tyranny.

I confess, my brethren, that no word of his has made such an
impression on me as that which he spoke to those who were so brutal
as to strike him before he was led to execution: “If I have spoken
well, why do you strike me?” That is what ought to be said to all
persecutors. If my opinion differs from yours on things that it is
impossible to understand; if I see the mercy of God where you would
see only his power; if I have said that all the disciples of Jesus
were equal, while you have thought it your duty to trample on them;
if I have worshipped God alone while you have given him associates;
if I have spoken ill in differing from you, bear witness of the evil;
and if I have spoken well, why do you heap on me your insults and
epithets? Why do you persecute me, cast me in irons, deliver me to
torture and flames, and insult me even after my death? If, indeed, I
had spoken ill, it was yours only to pity and instruct me. You are
confident that you are infallible, that your opinion is divine, that
the gates of hell will never prevail against it, that the whole world
will one day embrace your opinion, that the world will be subject to
you, and that you will rule from Mount Atlas to the islands of Japan.
How, then, can my opinion hurt you? You do not fear me, and you
persecute me! You despise me, and do away with me!

What reply can we make, my brethren, to these modest and forceful
reproaches? Only the reply of the wolf to the lamb, “You have
disturbed the water that I drink.” Thus have men treated each
other--the gospel in one hand and sword in the other; preaching
disinterestedness and accumulating treasures, praising humility and
walking on the heads of prostrate princes, recommending mercy and
shedding human blood.

If these barbarians find in the gospel any parable that may be
distorted in their favour by fraudulent interpretation, they fasten
upon it as an anvil on which they may forge their murderous weapons.

Is there a word about two swords hung above a wall? They arm
themselves at once with a hundred swords. It is said that a king has
killed his fatted beasts, compelled the blind and the lame to come
to his feast, and cast into outer darkness him who had no wedding
garment; is that, my brethren, a reason that justifies them in
putting you in prison like this guest, tearing your limbs asunder on
the rack, plucking out your eyes to make you blind like those who
were dragged to the feast, or slaying you as the king slew his fatted
beasts? Yet it is to such equivocal passages that men have so often
appealed for the right to desolate a large part of the earth.

Those terrible words, “Not peace, but a sword, I bring unto you,”
have caused more Christians to perish than ambition has ever
sacrificed.

The scattered and unhappy Jews are consoled in their wretchedness
when they see us always fighting each other from the earliest days
of Christianity, always at war in public or in secret, persecuted or
persecuting, oppressed or oppressing. They are united, and they laugh
at our interminable quarrels. It seems that we have been concerned
only in avenging them.

Wretches that we are, we insult the pagans, yet they never knew our
theological quarrels; they have never shed a drop of blood for the
interpretation of a dogma, and we have flooded the earth with it.
In the bitterness of my heart I say to you: Jesus was persecuted,
and whoever shares his thoughts will be persecuted. What was Jesus
in the eyes of men, who could assuredly have no suspicion of his
divinity? A good man who, having been born in poverty, spoke to the
poor in opposition to the superstitions of the rich Pharisees and the
insolent priests--the Socrates of Galilee. You know how he said to
these Pharisees, “Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which strain at a
gnat and swallow a camel! Woe unto you, for ye make clean the outside
of the cup and of the platter, but within you are full of extortion
and excess” (_Matthew_ xxiii.).

He often calls them “whitened sepulchres” and “race of vipers.” They
were, nevertheless, men of some dignity, and they avenged themselves
by his death. Arnold of Brescia, John Huss, and Jerome of Prague
said much less than this to the pontiffs of their time, and they,
too, were put to death. Never tilt against the ruling superstition,
unless you be powerful enough to withstand it, or clever enough
to escape its pursuit. The fable of Our Lady of Loretto is more
extravagant than all Ovid’s metamorphoses, it is true; the miracle
of St. Januarius at Naples is more ridiculous than the miracle of
Egnatia, mentioned by Horace, I agree. But say aloud at Naples or
Loretto what you think of these absurdities, and it will cost you
your life. It is not so among certain enlightened nations. There the
people have their errors, though they are less gross; and the least
superstitious people are always the most tolerant.

Cast off all superstition, and be more humane. But when you speak
against fanaticism, anger not the fanatics; they are delirious
invalids, who would assault their physicians. Let us make their ways
more gentle, not aggravate them. And let us instil, drop by drop,
into their souls that divine balm of tolerance which they would
reject with horror if offered to them in full.




                        EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

          (TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF COUNT DE CORBERA)


                             ARTICLE I.

Illustrious Romans, it is not the Apostle Paul who has the honour of
addressing you. It is not that worthy Jew who was born at Tarsus,
according to the _Acts of the Apostles_, and at Giscala according
to Jerome and other fathers; a dispute that has led some to believe
that one may be born in two different places at the same time, just
as there are among you certain bodies which are created by a few
Latin words, and are found in a hundred thousand places at the same
time.[38]

It is not the bald, hot-headed man, with long and broad nose,
black eyebrows, thick and continuous, and broad shoulders and
crooked legs,[39] who, having carried off the daughter of his
master Gamaliel, and being subsequently dissatisfied with her,
divorced her[40]; and, in pique, if we may believe contemporary
Jewish writers, put himself at the head of the nascent body of the
Christians.

It is not that St. Paul who, when he was a servant of Gamaliel, had
the good Stephen, the patron of deacons and of those who are stoned,
slain with stones, and who, while it was done, took care of the
cloaks of the murderers--a fitting employment for a priest’s valet.
It is not he who fell from his horse, blinded in midday by a heavenly
light, and to whom God said in the air, as he says every day to so
many others: “Why persecutest thou me?” It is not he who wrote to
the half-Jewish, half-Christian shopkeepers of Corinth: “Have we not
power to eat and to drink ... and to lead about a sister or a wife?
Who goeth to war any time at his own charge?”[41] By those fine words
the Reverend Father Menou, Jesuit and apostle of Lorraine, profited
so well that they brought him, at Nancy, eighty thousand francs a
year, a palace, and more than one handsome woman.

It is not he who wrote to the little flock in Thessalonica that the
universe was about to be destroyed, and on that account it was not
worth while keeping money about one. As Paul said: “For the Lord
himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the
archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall
rise first; then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up
together with them.”[42]

Observe, generous Romans, that St. Paul did but announce these
pleasant things to the tailors and grocers of Thessalonica in virtue
of the express prophecy of Luke (ch. xxi.), who had publicly--that
is, to some fifteen or sixteen chosen souls among the people--averred
that this generation would not pass away before the son of man came
on the clouds with great power and glory. It is true, O Romans,
that Jesus came not on the clouds with a great power; but at least
the popes have had this great power, and thus are the prophecies
fulfilled.

He who writes this epistle to the Romans is, again, not that St.
Paul, half Jew, half Christian, who, having preached Jesus and
announced the destruction of the Mosaic law, not only went to Judaise
in the temple of Hershalaim, which the vulgar call Jerusalem, but,
on the advice of his friend James, observed there certain rigorous
practices which the Holy Inquisition now punishes with death.[43]

He who writes to you has been neither priest’s valet, nor murderer,
nor keeper of cloaks, nor apostate, nor maker of tents, nor buried in
the depths of the sea, like Jonah, for twenty-four hours, nor caught
up to the third heaven, like Elias, without learning what the third
heaven is.

He who writes to you is more a citizen than this Saul Paul, who, it
is said, boasted of being one, and assuredly was not. For Tarsus, if
he came from there, was not made a Roman colony until the time of
Caracalla [211-217 A.D.]; and Giscala in Galilee, from which it is
more probable that he came, since he was of the tribe of Benjamin,
was certainly not a Roman town. Roman citizenship was not bestowed
on Jews at Tarsus or anywhere else. The author of the _Acts of the
Apostles_ (xvi., 37) asserts that this Jew Paul and another Jew named
Silas were arrested by the authorities in the town of Philippi in
Macedonia (a town founded by the father of Alexander, near which the
battle between Cassius and Brutus, on the one side, and Antony and
Octavian, on the other, decided the fate of your empire). Paul and
Silas were scourged for stirring up the populace, and Paul said to
the officers: “They have beaten us, being Romans” (_Acts_ xvi., 37).
Commentators freely admit that Silas was not a Roman citizen. They do
not say that the author of _Acts_ lied, but they agree that what he
says is untrue; and I am sorry for the Holy Spirit, who, no doubt,
dictated the _Acts of the Apostles_.

In fine, he who now writes to the descendants of Marcellus, the
Scipios, the Catos, Cicero, Titus, and the Antonines, is a Roman
gentleman of an ancient and transplanted family, one who cherishes
his venerable country, bemoans her condition, and has left his heart
in her Capitol.

Romans, listen to your fellow-citizen; listen to Rome and your
ancient valour.

_L’Italico valor non è ancor morto._


                             ARTICLE II.

When I travelled among you, I wept to see the Zocolanti occupying
that very Capitol to which Paulus Emilus led King Perseus, the
descendant of Alexander, chained to his triumphal car; that temple
to which the Scipios had brought the spoils of Carthage, and in
which Pompey triumphed over Asia, Africa, and Europe. But even more
bitter were my tears when I recalled the feast that Cæsar spread for
our ancestors on twenty-two thousand tables, and when I compared
the _congiaria_, that immense free distribution of corn, with the
scanty and poor bread that you eat to-day, sold to you at so high a
price by the apostolic chamber. Alas! you cannot even sow your soil
without the permission of these apostles; and, indeed, what have you
with which to sow it? There is not a citizen among you, save a few
that live in the Trastevere quarter, who has a plough. Your God fed
five thousand men, to say nothing of the women and children, with
five loaves and two gudgeons, according to St. John; four thousand
men, according to Matthew.[44] You, Romans, are made to swallow the
gudgeon[45] without receiving any bread. The successors of Lucullus
are reduced to the holy practice of fasting.

Your climate has never changed, whatever be said to the contrary.
Who, then, has so greatly changed your soil, your fortunes, and your
spirit? Whence comes it that the whole country from the gates of
Rome to Ostia is inhabited only by reptiles? Why do we find that,
from Montefiascone to Viterbo, and in the whole region through which
the Appian Way still leads to Naples, a vast desert has replaced the
smiling land that was once covered with palaces, gardens, harvests,
and countless numbers of citizens? I sought the Forum Romanum of
Trajan, that square once paved with reticulated marble, surrounded by
a colonnaded peristyle and adorned with a hundred statues; and what I
found was the Campo Vacino, the cattle-market, a market of lean and
milkless cows. And I asked myself: Where are those two million Romans
who once peopled this capital? I found that on the average only 3500
children are now born annually in Rome. Setting aside Jews, priests,
and foreigners, Rome cannot have one hundred thousand inhabitants.
I asked of them: Whose is this splendid building that I see, girt
about with ruins? It belongs to the monks, they said. Here once was
the house of Augustus; there Cicero dwelt, and there Pompey. On their
ruins have arisen convents.

I wept, Romans; and I think highly enough of you to believe that you
weep with me.


                            ARTICLE III.

It was explained to me that an aged priest, who has been appointed
pope by other priests, cannot find either the time or the will to
relieve your misery. He can think only of living. What interest
should he take in Romans? He is himself rarely a Roman. What care
should he take of an estate that will not pass to his children?
Rome is not his patrimony, as it was that of the Cæsars. It is
an ecclesiastical benefice; the papacy is a kind of commendatory
abbey,[46] which each abbot ruins while he lives. The Cæsars had
a real interest in seeing Rome flourish; the patricians, under
the Republic, had an even greater interest. No dignities could be
obtained unless the people were won with benefits, cajoled by the
appearance of virtue, or fired by great victories. A pope shuts
himself up with his money and his unleavened bread, and gives only
his blessing to the people that was once known as “the People King.”

Your misfortunes began with the transfer of the Empire of Rome to
the bounds of Thrace. Constantine, chosen emperor by a few barbaric
cohorts in distant England, triumphed over the Maxentius chosen
by you. Maxentius was drowned in the Tiber in the rout, and left
the Empire to his rival. But the conqueror went to hide himself
on the shores of the Black Sea; he could not have done more if he
had been beaten. Stained with debauch and crime, murderer of his
father-in-law, brother-in-law, nephew, son, and wife, abhorred by
the Romans, he abandoned the ancient religion under which they had
conquered so many States, and cast himself into the arms of the
Christians who had found the money to which he owed his crown.[47]
He thus betrayed the Empire as soon as he obtained it, and, in
transplanting to the Bosphorus the great tree that had sheltered
Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor, he did fatal injury to its roots.

Your next misfortune was this ecclesiastical maxim, quoted in a
celebrated French poem, “Le Lutrin,” and very gravely true: “Ruin
the world, if need be; it is the spirit of the Church.” The Church
fought the ancient religion of the Empire, and tore its own entrails
in the struggle, dividing, with equal fury and imprudence, on a
hundred incomprehensible questions of which none had ever heard
before. The Christian sects, hounding each other with fire and sword
for metaphysical chimæras and sophisms of the school, united to seize
the spoils of the priesthood founded by Numa. They did not rest until
they had destroyed the altar of Victory at Rome.

St. Ambrose, passing from the bar to the bishopric of Milan without
being a deacon, and your Damasus, whom a schism made bishop of
Rome, profited by this fatal success. They secured the destruction
of the altar of Victory, which had been set up on the Capitol[48]
nearly eight hundred years before--a monument of the courage of your
ancestors, destined to maintain their valour in their descendants.
The emblematic figure of Victory was no object of idolatry, like
your statues of Antony of Padua (who “hears those whom God will not
hear”), of Francis of Assisi (who is represented over the door of a
church at Rheims with this inscription: “To Francis and Jesus, both
crucified”), of St. Crepin, St. Barbe, and so many others; or like
the blood of a score of saints (headed by your patron Januarius,
whom the rest of the earth knows not) that is liquefied at Naples on
certain days, or the prepuce and navel of Jesus, or the milk, and
hair, and shift, and petticoat of his mother. These are idolatries,
as disgusting as they are accredited. But this Victory, surmounting a
globe, with outspread wings, a sword in hand, and head crowned with
laurels, was merely the noble device of the Roman Empire, the symbol
of virtue. Fanaticism robbed you of the pledge of your glory.

With what effrontery did these new enthusiasts dare to substitute
their Rochs, and Fiacres, and Eustaces, and Ursulas, and Scholasticas
for Neptune, the ruler of the seas; Mars, the god of war; and Juno,
the ruler of the air, under the sovereignty of the great Zeus, the
eternal Demiourgos, master of the elements, the gods, and men! A
thousand times more idolatrous than your ancestors, these maniacs
bade you worship the bones of the dead. These plagiarists of
antiquity borrowed the lustral water of the Romans and Greeks, their
procession, the confession that was made in the mysteries of Ceres
and Isis, their incense, libations, hymns, and the very garments of
their priests. They spoiled the old religion, and clad themselves in
its vesture. Even to-day they bow down before the statues of unknown
men, while they heap reproaches on a Pericles, a Solon, a Miltiades,
a Cicero, a Scipio, or a Cato for bending the knee before these
emblems of divinity.

Nay, is there a single episode in the Old or the New Testament that
has not been copied from the ancient mythologies of India, Chaldæa,
Egypt, and Greece? Is not the sacrifice of Idomene the plain source
of that of Jephtha? Is not the roe of Iphigenia the ram of Isaac? Do
you not recognise Eurydice in Edith, the wife of Lot? Minerva and the
winged horse Pegasus drew fountains from the rocks when they struck
them; the same prodigy is ascribed to Moses. Bacchus had crossed the
Red Sea dry-shod before he did, and he had caused the sun and moon
to stand still before Joshua. We have the same legends, the same
extravagances, on every side.

There is not a single miraculous action in the gospels that you will
not find in much earlier writers. The goat Amalthæa had a horn of
plenty long before it was said that Jesus had fed five thousand men,
not to speak of the women, with two fishes. The daughters of Anius
had changed water into wine and oil before there was any question
of the marriage-feast of Cana. Athalide, Hippolytus, Alcestis,
Pelops, and Heres had returned to life long before men spoke of
the resurrection of Jesus; and Romulus was born of a vestal virgin
more than seven hundred years before Jesus began to be regarded as
virgin-born. Compare, and judge for yourselves.


                             ARTICLE IV.

When your altar of Victory had been destroyed, the barbarians came
and finished the work of the priests. Rome became the prey and the
sport of nations that it had so long ruled, if not repressed.

It is true that you still had consuls, a senate, municipal laws; but
the popes have robbed you of what the Huns and Goths had left you.

It was in earlier times unheard of that a priest should set up royal
rights in any city of the Empire. It is well known all over Europe,
except in your chancellery, that, until the time of Gregory VII.,
your pope was but a metropolitan bishop, subject to the Greek, then
the Frankish, emperors, and then to the house of Saxony; receiving
investiture from them, compelled to send a profession of faith to
the bishops of Ravenna and Milan, as we read expressly in your
_Diarium Romanum_. His title of “patriarch of the west” gave him much
prestige, but no sovereign rights. A priest-king was a blasphemy
in a religion of which the founder expressly says in the gospels:
“There shall be no first and last among you.” Weigh well, Romans,
these other words that are put in the mouth of Jesus: “To sit on my
right hand and on my left it is not mine to give, but for whom it is
prepared of my father.”[49] Know, moreover, that the Jews meant, and
still mean, by “son of God” a just man. Inquire of the eight thousand
Jews who sell old clothes, as they ever have done, in your city, and
pay close attention to the following words: “Whosoever will be great
among you, let him be your minister. The Son of Man came not to be
ministered unto, but to minister.”[50]

Do these clear and precise words mean that Boniface VIII. was bound
to crush the Colonna family; that Alexander VI. was bound to poison
so many Roman barons; or that the bishop of Rome received from God,
in a time of anarchy, the duchy of Rome, Ferrara, Bologna, the March
of Ancona, Castro, and Ronciglione, and all the country from Viterbo
to Terracina, which have been wrested from their lawful owners? Think
you, Romans, that Jesus was sent on earth by God solely for the
Rezzonico?


                             ARTICLE V.

You will ask me by what means this strange revolution of all divine
and human laws was brought about. I am about to tell you; and I defy
the most zealous fanatic in whom there is still a spark of reason,
and the most determined rogue who has still a trace of decency in his
soul, to resist the force of the truth, if he reads this important
inquiry with the attention it deserves.

It is certain and undoubted that the earliest societies of the
Galilæans, afterwards called Christians, remained in obscurity, in
the mud of the cities; and it is certain that, when these Christians
began to write, they entrusted their books only to those who had
been initiated into their mysteries. They were not even given to the
catechumens, much less to partisans of the imperial religion. No
Roman before the time of Trajan [98-117 A.D.] knew that the gospels
existed; no Greek or Latin writer has ever quoted the word “gospel”;
Plutarch, Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius, who speak of everything,
are entirely ignorant of the existence of gospels. This proof, with
a hundred others, shows the absurdity of those authors who now hold,
or pretend to hold, that the disciples of Jesus died for the truth
of these gospels, of which the Romans did not hear a word during two
hundred years. The half-Jew, half-Christian Galilæans, separated from
the disciples of John, and from the Therapeuts, Essenians, Judaites,
Herodians, Sadducees, and Pharisees, recruited their little flock
among the lowest of the people, not, indeed, by means of books, but
of speech, by catechising the women and girls (_Acts_ xvi., 13 and
14) and children, and passing from town to town; in a word, like all
other sects.

Tell me frankly, Romans, what your ancestors would have said if
St. Paul, or Simon Barjona, or Matthias, or Matthew, or Luke, had
appeared in the Senate and said: “Our God, Jesus, who passed as
the son of a carpenter during life, was born in the year 752 from
the foundation of Rome, under the governorship of Cyrenius (_Luke_
ii., 2), in a Jewish village called Bethlehem, to which his father
Joseph and his mother Mariah had gone to be included in the census
which Augustus had ordered. This God was born in a stable, between
an ox and an ass.[51] The angels came down from heaven and informed
the peasants of his birth; a new star appeared in the heavens, and
led to him three kings or wise men from the east, who brought him a
tribute of incense, myrrh, and gold; but in spite of this gold he was
poor throughout life. Herod, who was then dying, and whom you had
made king, having learned that the new-born child was king of the
Jews, had fourteen thousand new-born infants of the district put to
death, to make sure that the king was included (_Matthew_ ii., 16).
However, one of our writers inspired by God says that the God-king
child fled to Egypt; and another writer, equally inspired by God,
says that the child remained at Bethlehem (_Luke_ ii., 39). One of
these sacred and infallible writers draws up a royal genealogy for
him; another composes for him an entirely different royal genealogy.
Jesus preaches to the peasants, and turns water into wine for them at
a marriage feast. Jesus is taken by the devil up into a mountain. He
drives out devils, and sends them into the body of two thousand pigs
in Galilee, where there never were any pigs. He greatly insulted the
magistrates, and the prætor Pontius had him executed. When he had
been executed, he manifested his divinity. The earth trembled; the
dead left their graves, and walked about in the city before the eyes
of Pontius. There was an eclipse of the sun at midday, at a time of
full moon, although that is impossible. He rose again secretly, went
up to heaven, and sent down another god, who fell on the heads of his
disciples in tongues of fire. May these same tongues fall on your
heads, conscript fathers; become Christians.”

If the lowest official in the Senate had condescended to answer this
discourse, he would have said: “You are weak-minded rogues, and ought
to be put in the asylum for the insane. You lie when you say that
your God was born in the year of Rome 752, under the governorship of
Cyrenius, the proconsul of Syria. Cyrenius did not govern Syria until
more than ten years afterwards, as our registers prove. Quintilius
Varus was at that time proconsul of Syria.

“You lie when you say that Augustus ordered a census of ‘all the
world.’ You must be very ignorant not to know that Augustus was
master only of one tenth of the world. If by ‘all the world’ you
mean the Roman Empire, know that neither Augustus nor anybody else
ever undertook such a census. Know that there was but one single
enumeration of the citizens of Rome and its territory under Augustus,
and that the number amounted to four million citizens; and unless
your carpenter Joseph and his wife Mariah brought forth your God in
a suburb of Rome, and this Jewish carpenter was a Roman citizen, he
cannot possibly have been included.

“You are telling a ridiculous untruth with your three kings and new
star, and the little massacred children, and the dead rising again
and walking in the streets under the eyes of Pontius Pilate, who
never wrote us a word about it, etc., etc.

“You are lying when you speak of an eclipse of the sun at a time of
full moon. Our prætor Pontius Pilate would have written to us about
it, and we, together with all the nations of the earth, would have
witnessed this eclipse. Return to your work, you fanatical peasants,
and thank the Senate that it has too much disdain to punish you.”


                             ARTICLE VI.

It is clear that the first half-Jewish Christians took care not to
address themselves to the Roman Senators, nor to any man of position
or any one above the lowest level of the people. It is well known
that they appealed only to the lowest class. To these they boasted
of healing nervous diseases, epilepsy, and uterine convulsions,
which ignorant folk, among the Romans as well as among the Jews,
Egyptians, Greeks, and Syrians, regarded as the work of charms or
diabolical possession. There must assuredly have been some cases of
healing. Some were cured in the name of Esculapius, and we have since
discovered at Rome a monument of a miracle of Esculapius, with the
names of the witnesses. Others were healed in the name of Isis, or
of the Syrian goddess; others in the name of Jesus, etc. The common
people healed in one of these names believed in those who propagated
it.


                            ARTICLE VII.

Thus the Christians made progress among the people by a device that
invariably seduces ignorant folk. But they had a still more powerful
means. They declaimed against the rich. They preached community of
goods; in their secret meetings they enjoined their neophytes to give
them the little money they had earned; and they quoted the alleged
instance of Sapphira and Ananias (_Acts_ v., 1-11), whom Simon
Barjona, called Cephas, which means Peter, caused to die suddenly
because they had kept a crown to themselves--the first and most
detestable example of priestly covetousness.

But they would not have succeeded in extorting the money of their
neophytes if they had not preached the doctrine of the cynic
philosophers--the idea of voluntary poverty. Even this, however, was
not enough to form a new flock. The end of the world had been long
announced. You will find it in Epicurus and Lucretius, his chief
disciple. Ovid had said, in the days of Augustus:

  Esse quoque in fatis meminisceret adfore tempus,
  Quo mare, quo tellus, correptaque regio coeli
  Ardeat, et mundi moles operosa laboret.[52]

According to others, the world had been made by a fortuitous
concourse of atoms, and would be destroyed by another fortuitous
concourse, as we find in the poems of Lucretius.

This idea came originally from the Brahmans of India. Many Jews had
adopted it by the time of Herod. It is formally stated in the gospel
of Luke, as you have seen; it is in Paul’s epistles; and it is in all
those who are known as fathers of the Church. The world was about
to be destroyed, it was thought; and the Christians announced a new
Jerusalem, which was seen in the air by night.[53] The Jews talked of
nothing but a new kingdom of heaven; it was the system of John the
Baptist, who had introduced on the Jordan the ancient Hindoo practice
of baptism in the Ganges. Baptism was practised by the Egyptians, and
adopted by the Jews. This new kingdom of heaven, to which the poor
alone would be admitted, was preached by Jesus and his followers.
They threatened with eternal torment those who would not believe in
the new heaven. This hell, invented by the first Zoroaster, became
one of the chief points of Egyptian theology.[54] From the latter
came the barque of Charon, Cerberus, the river Lethe, Tartarus, and
the Furies. From Egypt the idea passed to Greece, and from there to
the Romans; the Jews were unacquainted with it until the time when
the Pharisees preached it, shortly before the reign of Herod. It was
one of their contradictions to admit both hell and metempsychosis
(transmigration of souls); but who would look for reasoning among the
Jews? Their powers in that direction are confined to money matters.
The Sadducees and Samaritans rejected the immortality of the soul,
because it is not found anywhere in the Mosaic law.

This was the great spring which the early Christians, all
half-Jewish, relied upon to put the new machinery in action:
community of goods, secret meals, hidden mysteries, gospels read to
the initiated only, paradise for the poor, hell for the rich, and
exorcisms by charlatans. Here, in strict truth, we have the first
foundations of the Christian sect. If I deceive you--or, rather, if
I deliberately deceive you--I pray the God of the universe, the God
of all men, to wither the hand that writes this, to shatter with his
lightning a head that is convinced of the existence of a good and
just God, and to tear out from me a heart that worships him.


                            ARTICLE VIII.

Let us now, Romans, consider the artifices, roguery, and forgery
to which the Christians themselves have given the name of “pious
frauds”; frauds that have cost you your liberty and your goods, and
have brought down the conquerors of Europe to a most lamentable
slavery. I again take God to witness that I will say no word that
is not amply proved. If I wished to use all the arms of reason
against fanaticism, all the piercing darts of truth against error, I
should speak to you first of that prodigious number of contradictory
gospels which your popes themselves now recognise to be false. They
show, at least, that there were forgers among the first Christians.
This, however, is very well known. I have to tell you of impostures
that are not generally known, and are a thousand times more
pernicious.


                          _First Imposture_

It is a very ancient superstition that the last words of the dying
are prophetic, or are, at least, sacred maxims and venerable
precepts. It was believed that the soul, about to dissolve the union
with the body and already half united to the Deity, had a cloudless
vision of the future and of truth. Following this prejudice, the
Judæo-Christians forge, in the first century of the Church, the
_Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs_, written in Greek, to serve as
a prediction or a preparation for the new kingdom of Jesus. In the
testament of Reuben we find these words: “Adore his seed, for he will
die for you, in wars visible and invisible, and he will be your king
for ever.” This prophecy is applied to Jesus, in the usual way of
those who wrote fifty-four gospels in various places, and who nearly
all endeavoured to find in Jewish writers, especially those who were
called prophets, passages that could be twisted in favour of Jesus.
They even added some that are clearly recognised as false. The author
of the _Testament of the Patriarchs_ is one of the most impudent and
clumsy forgers that ever spoiled good parchment. His book was written
in Alexandria, in the school of a certain Mark.


                      _Second Chief Imposture_

They forged letters from the king of Edessa to Jesus, and from Jesus
to this supposed prince. There was no king at Edessa, which was a
town under the Syrian governor; the petty prince of Edessa never had
the title of king. Moreover, it is not said in any of the gospels
that Jesus could write; and if he could, he would have left some
proof of it to his disciples. Hence these letters are now declared by
all scholars to be forgeries.


                       _Third Chief Imposture_

                     (_which contains several_)

They forged _Acts of Pilate_, letters of Pilate, and even a history
of Pilate’s wife. The letters of Pilate are especially interesting.
Here is a fragment of one:

“It happened a short time ago, and I have verified it, that the Jews
in their envy drew on themselves a cruel condemnation. Their God
having promised that he would send his holy one to them from heaven
to be their legitimate king, and that he should be born of a virgin,
did indeed send him when I was procurator in Judæa. The leaders of
the Jews denounced him to me as a magician. I believed it, and had
him scourged, and handed him over to them; and they crucified him.
They put guards about his tomb, but he rose again the third day.”

To this forgery I may add that of the rescript of Tiberius to the
Senate, to raise Jesus to the rank of the imperial gods, and the
ridiculous letters of the philosopher Seneca to Paul, and of Paul to
Seneca, written in barbaric Latin; also the letters of the Virgin
Mary to St. Ignatius, and many other clumsy fictions of the same
nature. I will not draw out this list of impostures. It would amaze
you if I enumerated them one by one.


                         _Fourth Imposture_

The boldest, perhaps, and clumsiest of these forgeries is that of the
prophecies attributed to the Sibyls, foretelling the incarnation,
miracles, and death of Jesus, in acrostic verse. This piece of
folly, unknown to the Romans, fed the belief of the catechumens. It
circulated among us for eight centuries, and we still sing in one of
our hymns[55] “teste David cum Sibylla” [witness David and the Sibyl].

You are astonished, no doubt, that this despicable comedy was
maintained so long, and that men could be led with such a bridle as
that. But as the Christians were plunged in the most stupid barbarism
for fifteen hundred years, as books were very rare and theologians
very astute, one could say anything at all to poor wretches who would
believe anything at all.


                          _Fifth Imposture_

Illustrious and unfortunate Romans, before we come to the pernicious
untruths which have cost you your liberty, your property, and your
glory, and put you under the yoke of a priest; before I speak to you
of the alleged pontificate of Simon Barjona, who is said to have been
bishop of Rome for twenty-five years, you must be informed of the
“Apostolic Constitutions,” the first foundation of the hierarchy that
crushes you to-day.

At the beginning of the second century there was no such thing as an
_episcopos_ (“overseer”) or bishop, clothed with real dignity for
life, unalterably attached to a certain see, and distinguished from
other men by his clothes; bishops, in fact, dressed like ordinary
laymen until the middle of the fifth century. The meeting was held
in a chamber of some retired house. The minister was chosen by the
initiated, and continued his work as long as they were satisfied.
There were no altars, candles, or incense; the earliest fathers of
the Church speak of altars and temples with a shudder.[56] They were
content to make a collection and sup together. When the Christian
society had grown, however, ambition set up an hierarchy. How did
they go about it? The rogues who led the enthusiasts made them
believe that they had discovered the apostolic constitutions written
by St. John and St. Matthew: “quæ ego Matthæus et Joannes vobis
tradidimus [which I, Matthew, and John have given you].”[57] In these
Matthew is supposed to say (II., xxxvi.): “Be ye careful not to
judge your bishop, for it is given to the priests alone to judge.”
Matthew and John say (II., xxxiv.): “As much as the soul is above
the body, so much higher is the priesthood than royalty; consider
your bishop as a king, an absolute master (_dominum_); give him your
fruits, your works, your firstlings, your tithes, your savings, the
first and tenth part of your wine, oil, and corn, etc.” Again (II.,
xxx.): “Let the bishop be a god to you, and the deacon a prophet”;
and (II., xxxviii.): “In the festivals let the deacon have a double
portion, and the priest double that of the deacon; and if they be not
at table, send the portions to them.”

You see, Romans, the origin of your custom of spreading your tables
to give indigestion to your pontiffs. Would to God they had confined
themselves to the sin of gluttony.

You will further observe with care, in regard to this imposture
of the constitutions of the apostles, that it is an authentic
monument of the dogmas of the second century, and that forgery at
least does homage to truth in maintaining a complete silence about
innovations that could not be foreseen--innovations with which you
have been deluged century after century. You will find, in this
second-century document, neither trinity, nor consubstantiality, nor
transubstantiation, nor auricular confession. You will not find in
it that the mother of Jesus was the mother of God, that Jesus had
two natures and two wills, or that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the
father and the son. All these singular ornaments of imagination,
unknown to the religion of the gospels, have been added since to the
crude structure which fanaticism and ignorance raised up in the first
centuries.

You will assuredly find in it three persons, but not three persons
in one God. Read with all the acuteness of your mind, the only
treasure that your tyrants have left you, the common prayer which the
Christians, by the mouth of their bishop, offered in their meetings
in the second century:

“O all-powerful, unengendered, inaccessible God, the one true God,
father of Christ thy only son, God of the paraclete, God of all, thou
hast made the disciples of Christ doctors, etc.”[58]

Here, clearly, is one sole God who commands Christ and the paraclete
[Holy Ghost]. Judge for yourselves if that has any resemblance to
the trinity and consubstantiality which were afterwards declared at
Nicæa, in spite of the strong protest of eighteen bishops and two
thousand priests.[59]

In another place (III., xvi.) the author of the _Apostolic
Constitutions_, who is probably a bishop of the Christians at Rome,
says expressly that the father is God above all.

That is the doctrine of Paul, finding expression so frequently in
his epistles. “We have peace in God through Our Lord Jesus Christ”
(_Romans_ v., 1). “If through the offence of one many be dead, much
more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man,
Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many” (_Romans_ v., 15). “We are
heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (_Romans_ viii., 17).
“Receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of
God” (_Romans_ xv., 7). “To God only wise, be glory through Jesus
Christ for ever” (_Romans_ xvi., 27). “That the God of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, the father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom”
(_Ephesians_ i., 17).

Thus does the Jew-Christian Saul Paul always express himself, and
thus is Jesus himself made to speak in the gospels. “My Father is
greater than I” (_John_ xiv., 28); that is to say, God can do what
men cannot do. All the Jews said “my father” when they spoke of God.

The Lord’s Prayer begins with the words “Our Father.” Jesus said: “Of
that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but
my Father only” (_Matthew_ xxiv., 36); and “That is not mine to give,
but for whom it is prepared by my Father” (_Matthew_ xx., 23). It
is also very remarkable that when Jesus awaited arrest, and sweated
blood and water, he cried out: “Father, remove this cup from me”
(_Luke_ xxii., 42). No gospel has put into his mouth the blasphemy
that he was God, or consubstantial with God.

You will ask me, Romans, why and how he was made into a God in the
course of time? I will ask you in turn why and how Bacchus, Perseus,
Hercules, and Romulus were made gods? In their case, moreover, the
sacrilege did not go so far as to give them the title of supreme god
and creator. This blasphemy was reserved for the Christian outgrowth
of the Jewish sect.


                       _Sixth Chief Imposture_

I pass over the countless impostures of “The Travels of Simon
Barjona,” the “Gospel of Simon Barjona,” his “Apocalypse,” the
“Apocalypse” of Cerinthus (ridiculously attributed to John), the
epistles of Barnaby, the “Gospel of the Twelve Apostles,” their
liturgies, the “Canons of the Council of the Apostles,” the
“Apostles’ Creed,” the “Travels of Matthew,” the “Travels of Thomas,”
and so many other vagaries that are now recognised to be the work of
forgers, who passed them off under venerated Christian names.

I will not insist much on the romance of the alleged Pope St.
Clement, who calls himself the first successor of St. Peter. I will
note only that Simon Barjona and he met an old man, who complained
of the unfaithfulness of his wife, who had lain with his servant.
Clement asks how he learned it. “By my wife’s horoscope,” said the
good man, “and from my brother, with whom she wished to lie, but he
would not.” From these words Clement recognised his father in the old
man.[60] From Peter Clement learned that he was of the blood of the
Cæsars. On such romances, Romans, was the papal power set up!


                      _Seventh Chief Imposture_

    _On the Supposed Pontificate of Simon Barjona, Called Peter_

Who was the first to say that Simon, the poor fisherman, came from
Galilee to Rome, spoke Latin there (though he could not possibly know
more than his native dialect), and in the end was pope of Rome for
twenty-five years? It was a Syrian named Abdias, who lived about the
end of the first century, and is said to have been bishop of Babylon
(a good bishopric). He wrote in Syriac, and we have his work in a
Latin translation by Julius the African. Listen well to what this
intelligent writer says. He was an eye-witness, and his testimony is
irrefragable.

Simon Barjona Peter, having, he says, raised to life Tabitha, or
Dorcas, the sempstress of the apostles, and having been put in prison
by the orders of King Herod (though there was no King Herod at the
time); and an angel having opened the doors of the prison for him
(after the custom of angels), met, in Cæsarea, the other Simon, of
Samaria, known as the Magician (Magus), who also performed miracles.
They began to defy each other. Simon the Samaritan went off to the
Emperor Nero at Rome. Simon Barjona followed him, and the emperor
received them excellently. A cousin of the emperor had died, and it
was a question which of them could restore him to life. The Samaritan
has the honour of opening the ceremony. He calls upon God, and the
dead man gives signs of life and shakes his head. Simon Peter calls
on Jesus Christ, and tells the dead man to rise; forthwith he does
rise, and embraces Peter. Then follows the well-known story of the
two dogs. Then Abdias tells how Simon flew in the air, and his rival
Simon Peter brought him down. Simon the Magician broke his legs, and
Nero had Simon Peter crucified, head downwards, for breaking the legs
of the other Simon.

This harlequinade was described, not only by Abdias, but by some one
named Marcellus, and by a certain Hegesippus, whom Eusebius often
quotes in his history. Pray notice, judicious Romans, how this Simon
Peter may have reigned spiritually in your city for twenty-five
years. He came to it under Nero, according to the earliest writers of
the Church; he died under Nero; and Nero reigned only thirteen years.

Read the _Acts of the Apostles_. Is there any question therein of
Peter going to Rome? Not the least mention. Do you not see that,
when the fiction began that Peter was the first of the apostles, it
was thought that the imperial city alone was worthy of him? See how
clumsily you have been deluded in everything. Is it possible that the
son of God, nay God himself, should have made use of a play on words,
a ridiculous pun, to make Simon Barjona the head of his Church: “Thou
art Peter, and upon this rock [petra] I will build my Church.” Had
Barjona been called Pumpkin, Jesus might have said to him: “Thou art
Pumpkin, and Pumpkin shall henceforward be the king of the fruits in
my garden.”[61]

For more than three hundred years the alleged successor of a Galilean
peasant was unknown to Rome. Let us now see how the popes became your
masters.


                         _Eighth Imposture_

No one who is acquainted with the history of the Greek and Latin
Churches can be unaware that the metropolitan sees established their
chief rights at the Council of Chalcedon, convoked in the year 451 by
the order of the Emperor Marcian and of Pulcheria [his wife], and
composed of six hundred and thirty bishops. The senators who presided
in the emperor’s name had on their right the patriarchs of Alexandria
and Jerusalem, on their left the patriarch of Constantinople and the
deputies of the patriarch of Rome. It was in virtue of the canons
of this Council that the episcopal sees shared the dignities of the
cities in which they were situated. The bishops of the two imperial
cities, Rome and Constantinople, were declared to be the first
bishops, with equal prerogatives, by the celebrated twenty-eighth
canon:

“The fathers have justly granted prerogatives to the see of ancient
Rome, as to a reigning city, and the 150 bishops of the first Council
of Constantinople, very dear to God, have for the same reason given
the same privileges to the new Rome; they have rightly thought that
this city, in which the Emperor and Senate reside, should be equal to
it in all ecclesiastical matters.”

The popes have always contested the authenticity of this canon; they
have twisted and perverted its whole meaning. What did they do at
length to evade this equality and gradually to destroy all the titles
of subjection which placed them under the emperors like all other
men? They forged the famous donation of Constantine, which has been
for many centuries so strictly regarded as genuine that it was a
mortal and unpardonable sin to doubt it, and whoever did so incurred
the greater excommunication by the very fact of doubting.

A very pretty thing was this donation of Constantine to Bishop
Sylvester.

“We,” says the Emperor, “with all our satraps and the whole Roman
people, have thought it good to give to the successors of St. Peter
a greater power than that of our serene majesty.” Do you not think,
Romans, that the word “satrap” comes in very well there?

With equal authenticity, Constantine goes on, in this noble diploma,
to say that he has put the Apostles Peter and Paul in large amber
caskets; that he has built the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul;
that he has given them vast domains in Judæa, Greece, Thrace, Asia,
etc. (to maintain the luminary); that he has given to the pope his
Lateran palace, with chamberlains and guards; and that, lastly, he
gives him, as a pure donation for himself and his successors, the
city of Rome, Italy, and all the western provinces; and all this is
given to thank the Pope Sylvester for having cured him of leprosy,
and having baptised him--though, in point of fact, he was baptised
only on his death-bed, by Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia.

Never was there a document more ridiculous from one end to the other,
yet more accredited in the ignorant ages in which Europe was so long
detained after the fall of your empire.


                          _Ninth Imposture_

I pass over the thousand and one little daily impostures to come at
once to the great fraud of the Decretals.

These false Decretals were spread everywhere in the time of
Charlemagne. In these, Romans, the better to rob you of your liberty,
the bishops are deprived of theirs; it is decreed that the bishop of
Rome shall be their only judge. Certainly, if he is the sovereign
of the bishops, he should soon be yours; and that is what happened.
These false Decretals abolished the Councils, and even abolished your
Senate, which became merely a court of justice, subject to the will
of a priest. Here is the real source of the humiliation you have
suffered. Your rights and privileges, so long maintained by your
wisdom, could be wrested from you only by untruth. Only by lying to
God and men did they succeed in making slaves of you; but they have
never extinguished the love of liberty in your hearts. The greater
the tyranny, the greater is that love. The sacred name of liberty is
still heard in your conversations and gatherings, and in the very
antechamber of the pope.


                             ARTICLE IX.

Cæsar was but your dictator; Augustus was content to be your general,
consul, and tribune; Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero left you your
elections, your prerogatives, and your dignities; even the barbarians
respected them. You maintained your municipal government. Not by the
authority of your bishop, Gregory III., but of your own decision, you
offered the dignity of patrician to the great Charles Martel, master
of his king, conqueror of the Saracens in the year 741 of our faulty
vulgar era.

Believe not that it was the Bishop Leo III. who made Charlemagne
emperor; it is an absurd romance of the secretary Eginhard, a vile
flatterer of the popes, who had won him. By what right and in what
way could a subject bishop make an emperor? Emperors were created
only by the people, or by the armies that took the place of the
people.

It was you, people of Rome, who used your rights; you who would
no longer depend on a Greek emperor, who gave you no aid; you who
appointed Charlemagne, or he would have been a usurper. The annalists
of the time agree that all was arranged by Carolo and your leading
officers, as is, indeed, most probable. Your bishop’s only share in
it was to conduct an empty ceremony and receive rich presents. The
only authority he had in your city was that of the prestige attaching
to his mitre, his clergy, and his ability.

But while you gave yourselves to Charlemagne, you retained the
election of your officers. The police was in your hands; you kept
possession of the mole of Adrian, so absurdly called in later times
the Castello Sant’ Angelo; and you were not wholly enslaved until
your bishops seized that fortress.

They made their way step by step to that supreme greatness, so
expressly forbidden them by him whom they call their God, and of
whom they dare to call themselves the vicars. They had never any
jurisdiction in Rome under the Othos. Excommunication and intrigue
were their sole arms; and even when, in an age of anarchy, they
became the real sovereigns, they never dared to assume the title. I
defy the astutest of those fabricators of titles who abound in your
court to find a single one in which the pope is described as prince
by the grace of God. A strange princedom, when one fears to avow it!

The imperial cities of Germany, which have bishops, are free; and
you, Romans, are not. The archbishop of Cologne has not even the
right to sleep in that city; and your pope will hardly allow you to
sleep in your own. The sultan of the Turks is far less despotic at
Constantinople than the pope has become at Rome.

You perish miserably in the shade of superb colonnades. Your noble
and faded paintings, and your dozen gems of ancient sculpture, bring
you neither a good dinner nor a good bed. The opulence is for your
masters: the indigence is for you. The lot of a slave among the
ancient Romans was a hundred times better than yours. _He_ might
acquire a large fortune; _you_ are born serfs, you die serfs, and
the only oil you have is that of the Last Anointing. Slaves in body
and in soul, your tyrants do not even allow you to read, in your own
tongue, the book on which they say your religion is founded.

Awake, Romans, at the call of liberty, truth, and nature. The cry
rings over Europe. You must hear it. Break the chains that bind your
generous hands--the chains forged by tyranny in the den of imposture.




                       THE SERMON OF THE FIFTY


Fifty cultivated, pious, and reasonable persons have, for a year
past, met every Sunday in a large commercial town. They have prayers,
and then a member of the society gives a discourse. They afterwards
dine, and a collection for the poor is made after dinner. Each
presides in turn, and it is the duty of the president to offer the
prayer and give the sermon. Here are one of the prayers and one of
the sermons.

If the seed of these words fall on good soil, it will assuredly bear
fruit.


                               PRAYER

God of all the globes and stars, the one prayer that it is meet
to offer to you is submission. How can we ask anything of him who
arranged and enchained all things from the beginning? Yet if it is
permitted to expose our needs to a father, preserve in our hearts
this feeling of submission and a pure religion. Keep from us all
superstition. Since there are those who insult you with unworthy
sacrifices, abolish those infamous mysteries. Since there are those
who dishonour the divinity with absurd fables, may those fables
perish for ever. If the days of the prince and the magistrate were
not numbered from all eternity, give them length of days. Preserve
the purity of our ways, the friendship of our brethren for each
other, their goodwill towards all men, their obedience to the laws,
and their wisdom in private life. Let them live and die in the
worship of one God, the rewarder of good, the punisher of evil; a God
that could not be born or die, nor have associates, but who has too
many rebellious children in this world.


                               SERMON

My brethren, religion is the secret voice of God speaking to men.
It ought to unite men, not divide them; hence every religion that
belongs to one people only is false. Ours is, in principle, that of
the whole universe; for we worship a supreme being as all nations do,
we practise the justice which all nations teach, and we reject all
the untruths with which the nations reproach each other. At one with
them in the principle which unites them, we differ from them in the
things about which they are in conflict.

The point on which all men of all times agree must be the centre of
truth, and the points on which they all differ must be standards
of falsehood. Religion must conform to morality, and, like it, be
universal; hence every religion whose dogmas offend against morality
is certainly false. It is under this twofold aspect of perversity
and falseness that we will, in this discourse, examine the books of
the Hebrews and of those who have succeeded them. Let us first see
if these books conform to morality; we shall then see if they have
any shade of probability. The first two points will deal with the Old
Testament; the third will discuss the New.


                            _First Point_

You know, my brethren, what horror fell on us when we read together
the writings of the Hebrews, confining our attention to those
features which offend against purity, charity, good faith, justice,
and reason--features which one not only finds in every chapter, but,
unhappily, one finds consecrated in them.

First, to say nothing of the extravagant injustice which they
venture to ascribe to the supreme being, in endowing a serpent with
speech in order to seduce a woman and her innocent posterity, let
us run over in succession all the historical horrors which outrage
nature and good sense. One of the patriarchs, Lot, the nephew of
Abraham, receives in his house two angels disguised as pilgrims; the
inhabitants of Sodom entertain impure desires of these angels; Lot,
who had two daughters promised in marriage, offers to abandon them
to the people instead of the two strangers. These young women must
have been strangely familiar with evil ways, since the first thing
they do after the destruction of their town by a rain of fire, and
after their mother has been changed into a pillar of salt, is to
intoxicate their father on two consecutive nights, in order to sleep
with him in succession. It is an imitation of the ancient Arabic
legend of Cyniras and Myrrha. But in this more decent legend Myrrha
is punished for her crime, while the daughters of Lot are rewarded
with what is, in Jewish eyes, the greatest and dearest blessing: they
become the mothers of a numerous posterity.

We will not insist on the falsehood of Isaac, the father of the just,
who says that his wife is his sister; whether he was merely repeating
the falsehood of Abraham, or Abraham was really guilty of taking his
sister to wife. But let us dwell for a moment on the patriarch Jacob,
who is offered to us as a model man. He compels his brother, who is
dying of hunger, to give up his birthright for a dish of lentils. He
afterwards deceives his aged father on his death-bed. After deceiving
his father, he deceives and robs his father-in-law Laban. Not content
with wedding two sisters, he lies with all his servants; and God
blesses this licentiousness and trickery. Who are the children of
such a father? His daughter Dinah pleases a prince of Sichem, and
it is probable that she loves the prince, since she lies with him.
The prince asks her in marriage, and she is promised on condition
that he and all his people are circumcised. The prince accepts the
condition; but as soon as he and his people undergo this painful
operation--which, nevertheless, leaves them strong enough to defend
themselves--Jacob’s family murder all the men of Sichem and enslave
their women and children.

We have in our infancy heard the story of Pelopæus. This incestuous
abomination is repeated in Judah, the patriarch and father of the
first tribe. He lies with his daughter-in-law, and then wishes to
have her killed. The book declares that then Joseph, a child of this
vagabond family, is sold into Egypt, and that, foreigner as he is,
he is made first minister as a reward for explaining a dream. What a
first minister he was, compelling a whole nation to enslave itself,
during a time of famine, to obtain food! What magistrate among us
would, in time of famine, dare to propose so abominable a bargain,
and what nation would accept it? Let us not stay to examine how
seventy members of the family of Joseph, who settled in Egypt, could
in two hundred and fifteen years increase to six hundred thousand
fighting men, without counting the women, old men, and children,
which would make a total of more than two millions. Let us not
discuss how it is that the text has four hundred and thirty years,
when the same text has given two hundred and fifteen. The infinite
number of contradictions, which are the seal of imposture, is not
the point which we are considering. Let us likewise pass over the
ridiculous prodigies of Moses and of Pharaoh’s magicians, and all the
miracles wrought to give the Jewish people a wretched bit of poor
country, which they afterwards purchase by blood and crime, instead
of giving them the fertile soil of Egypt, where they were. Let us
confine ourselves to the frightful iniquity of their ways.

Their God had made a thief of Jacob, and he now makes thieves of the
entire people. He orders his people to steal and take away with them
all the gold and silver vessels and utensils of the Egyptians. Behold
these wretches, to the number of six hundred thousand fighting men,
instead of taking up arms like men of spirit, flying like brigands
led by their God. If their God had wished to give them a good
country, he might have given them Egypt. He does not, however; he
leads them into a desert. They might have fled by the shortest route,
yet they go far out of their way to cross the Red Sea dry-foot. After
this fine miracle Moses’ own brother makes them another god, and this
god is a calf. To punish his brother Moses commands certain priests
to kill their sons, brothers, and fathers; and they kill twenty-three
thousand Jews, who let themselves be slain like cattle.

After this butchery it is not surprising to hear that this abominable
people sacrifices human victims to its god, whom it calls Adonai,
borrowing the name of Adonis from the Phœnicians. The twenty-ninth
verse of chapter xxvii. of _Leviticus_ expressly forbids the
redemption of those who are destined for sacrifice, and it is in
virtue of this cannibalistic law that Jephthah, some time afterwards,
offers up his own daughter.

It was not enough to slay twenty-three thousand men for a calf; we
have again twenty-four thousand sacrificed for having intercourse
with idolatrous women. It is, my brethren, a worthy prelude and
example of persecution on the ground of religion.

This people advances in the deserts and rocks of Palestine. Here is
your splendid country, God says to them. Slay all the inhabitants,
kill all the male infants, make an end of their married women, keep
the young girls for yourselves. All this is carried out to the
letter, according to the Hebrew books; and we should shudder at the
account, if the text did not add that the Jews found in the camp
of the Midianites 675,000 sheep, 62,000 cattle, 61,000 asses, and
32,000 girls. Happily, the absurdity undoes the barbarism. Once
more, however, I am not concerned here with what is ridiculous and
impossible; I select only what is execrable. Having passed the Jordan
dry-shod, as they crossed the sea, we find our people in the promised
land.

The first person to let in this holy people, by an act of treachery,
is Rahab, a strange character for God to associate with himself.
He levels the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpet; the
holy people enters the town--to which it had no right, on its own
confession--and slays the men, women, and children. Let us pass over
the other carnages, the crucifixion of kings, the supposed wars
against the giants of Gaza and Ascalon, and the murder of those who
could not pronounce the word “Shibboleth.”

Listen to this fine story.

A Levite, with his wife, arrives on his ass at Gibeah, in the tribe
of Benjamin. Some of the Benjamites, who are bent on committing
the sin of sodomy with the Levite, turn their brutality upon the
woman, who dies of the violence. Were the culprits punished? Not
at all. The eleven tribes slaughtered the whole tribe of Benjamin;
only six hundred men escaped. But the eleven tribes are afterwards
sorry to see a tribe perish, and, to restore it, they exterminate
the inhabitants of one of their own towns in order to take from it
six hundred girls, whom they give to the six hundred Benjamites who
survive to perpetuate this splendid race.

How many crimes committed in the name of the Lord! We will give
only that of the man of God (Ehud). The Jews, having come so far to
conquer, are subject to the Philistines. In spite of the Lord, they
have sworn obedience to King Eglon. A holy Jew, named Ehud, asks
permission to speak in private with the king on the part of God. The
king does not fail to grant the audience. Ehud assassinates him,
and his example has been used many times by Christians to betray,
destroy, or massacre so many sovereigns.

At length this chosen nation, which had thus been directed by God
himself, desires to have a king; which greatly displeases the priest
Samuel. The first Jewish king renews the custom of immolating men.
Saul prudently enjoined that his soldiers should not eat on the day
they fought the Philistines, to give them more vigour; he swore to
the Lord that he would immolate to him any man who ate. Happily, the
people were wiser than he; they would not suffer the king’s son to
be sacrificed for eating a little honey. But listen, my brethren, to
this most detestable, yet most consecrated, act. It is said that Saul
takes prisoner a king of the country, named Agag. He did not kill his
prisoner; he acted as is usual in humane and civilised nations. What
happened? The Lord is angry, and Samuel, priest of the Lord, says to
Saul: “You are reprobate for having spared a king who surrendered to
you.” And the priestly butcher at once cuts Agag into pieces. What
would you say, my brethren, if, when the Emperor Charles V. had a
French king in his hands, his chaplain came and said to him: “You
are damned for not killing Francis I.,” and proceeded to cut the
French king to pieces before the eyes of the emperor?

What will you say of the holy King David, the king who found favour
in the eyes of the God of the Jews, and merited to be an ancestor
of the Messiah? This good king is at first a brigand, capturing and
pillaging all he finds. Among others, he despoils a rich man named
Nabal, marries his wife, and flies to King Achish. During the night
he descends upon the villages of King Achish, his benefactor, with
fire and sword. He slaughters men, women, and children, says the
sacred text, lest there be any one left to take the news. When he is
made king he ravishes the wife of Uriah, and has the husband put to
death; and it is from this adulterous homicide that the Messiah--God
himself--descends. What blasphemy! This David, who thus becomes an
ancestor of God as a reward of his horrible crime, is punished for
the one good and wise action which he did. There is no good and
prudent prince who ought not to know the number of his people, as
the shepherd should know the number of his flock. David has them
enumerated--though we are not told what the number was--and for
making this wise and useful enumeration a prophet comes from God to
give him the choice of war, pestilence, or famine.

Let us not linger, my dear brethren, over the numberless barbarities
of the kings of Judah and Israel--their murders and outrages, mixed
up always with ridiculous stories; though even the ridiculous in
them is always bloody, and not even the prophet Elisha is free from
barbarism. This worthy devotee has forty children devoured by bears
because the innocent youngsters had called him “bald.” Let us leave
this atrocious nation in the Babylonian captivity and in its bondage
to the Romans, with all the fine promises of their god Adonis or
Adonai, who had so often promised the Jews the sovereignty of the
earth. In fine, under the wise government of the Romans, a king is
born to the Hebrews. You know, my brethren, who this king, _shilo_,
or Messiah is; it is he who, after being at first numbered among
the prophets without a mission, who, though not priests, made a
profession of inspiration, was, after some centuries, regarded as a
god. We need go no farther; let us see on what pretexts, what facts,
what miracles, what prophecies--in a word, on what foundation, this
disgusting and abominable history is based.


                           _Second Point_

O God, if thou thyself didst descend upon the earth, and didst
command me to believe this tissue of murders, thefts, assassinations,
and incests committed by thy order and in thy name, I should say to
thee: No; thy sanctity cannot ask me to acquiesce in these horrible
things that outrage thee. Thou seekest, no doubt, to try me.

How, then, my virtuous and enlightened hearers, could we accept this
frightful story on the wretched evidence which is offered in support
of it?

Run briefly over the books that have been falsely attributed to
Moses. I say falsely, since it is not possible for Moses to have
written about things that happened long after his time. None of us
would believe that the memoirs of William, Prince of Orange, were
written with his own hand if there were allusions in these memoirs
to things that happened after his death. Let us see what is narrated
in the name of Moses. First, God created the light, which he calls
“day”; then the darkness, which he calls “night,” and it was the
first day. Thus there were days before the sun was made.

On the sixth day God makes man and woman; but the author, forgetting
that woman has been made already, afterwards derives her from one of
Adam’s ribs. Adam and Eve are put in a garden from which four rivers
issue; and of these rivers there are two, the Euphrates and the
Nile, which have their sources a thousand miles from each other. The
serpent then spoke like a man; it was the most cunning of animals.
It persuades the woman to eat an apple, and so has her driven from
paradise. The human race increases, and the children of God fall in
love with the daughters of men. There were giants on the earth, and
God was sorry that he had made man. He determined to exterminate him
by a flood; but wished to save Noah, and ordered him to make a vessel
of poplar wood, three hundred cubits in length. Into this vessel were
to be brought seven pairs of all the clean animals, and two pairs of
the unclean. It was necessary to feed them during the ten months that
the water covered the earth. You can imagine what would be needed to
feed fourteen elephants, fourteen camels, fourteen buffaloes, and
as many horses, asses, deer, serpents, ostriches--in a word, more
than two thousand species.[62] You will ask me whence came the water
to cover the whole earth and rise fifteen cubits above the highest
mountains? The text replies that it came from the cataracts of
heaven. Heaven knows where these cataracts are. After the deluge God
enters into an alliance with Noah and with all the animals; and in
confirmation of this alliance he institutes the rainbow.

Those who wrote these things were not, as you perceive, great
physicists. However, here is Noah with a religion given to him by
God, and this religion is neither Jewish nor Christian. The posterity
of Noah seeks to build a tower that shall reach to heaven. A fine
enterprise! But God fears it, and causes the workers suddenly to
speak several different tongues, and they disperse. The whole is
written in this ancient oriental vein.

A rain of fire converts towns into a lake; Lot’s wife is changed into
a salt statue; Jacob fights all night with an angel, and is hurt in
the leg; Joseph, sold as a slave into Egypt, is made first minister
because he explains a dream. Seventy members of the family settle in
Egypt, and in two hundred and fifteen years, as we saw, multiply into
two millions. It is these two million Hebrews who fly from Egypt, and
go the longest way in order to have the pleasure of crossing the sea
dry-shod.

But there is nothing surprising about this miracle. Pharaoh’s
magicians performed some very fine miracles. Like Moses, they changed
a rod into a serpent, which is a very simple matter. When Moses
changed water into blood, they did the same. When he brought frogs
into existence, they imitated him. But they were beaten when it came
to the plague of lice; on that subject the Jews knew more than other
nations.

In the end Adonai causes the death of each first-born in Egypt in
order to allow his people to leave in peace. The sea divides to let
them pass; it was the least that could be done on such an occasion.
The remainer is on the same level. The people cry out in the desert.
Some of the husbands complain of their wives; at once a water is
found which causes any woman who has forfeited her honour to swell
and burst. They have neither bread nor paste; quails and manna are
rained on them. Their garments last forty years, and grow with the
children. Apparently clothes descend from heaven for the new-born
children.

A prophet of the district seeks to curse the people, but his ass
opposes the project, together with an angel, and the ass speaks very
reasonably and at great length to the prophet.

When they attack a town, the walls fall at the sound of trumpets;
just as Amphion built walls to the sound of the flute. But the
finest miracle is when five Amorite kings--that is to say, five
village sheiks--attempt to oppose the ravages of Joshua. They are
not merely vanquished and cut to pieces, but the Lord sends a great
rain of stones upon the fugitives. Even that is not enough. A few
escape, and, in order to give the Israelites time to pursue them,
nature suspends its eternal laws. The sun halts at Gibeon, and the
moon at Aijalon. We do not quite understand how the moon comes in,
but the books of Joshua leave no room for doubt as to the fact. Now
let us pass to other miracles, and go on to Samson, who is depicted
as a famous plunderer, a friend of God. Samson routs a thousand
Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, because he is not shaved, and
ties by the tails three hundred foxes which he found in a certain
place.

There is hardly a page that does not contain similar stories. In one
place it is the shade of Samuel appearing in response to the voice
of a witch; in another it is the shadow on a sun-dial (assuming that
these miserable folk had sun-dials) receding ten degrees at the
prayer of Hezekiah, who prudently asks for this sign. God gives him
the alternatives of advancing or retarding the hour, and Dr. Hezekiah
thinks that it is not difficult to put the shadow on, but very
difficult to put it back.

Elias rises to heaven in a fiery chariot; children sing in a fiery
furnace. I should never come to an end if I wished to enter into all
the details of the unheard-of extravagances that swarm in this book.
Never was common-sense assailed with such indecency and fury.

Such is, from one end to the other, the Old Testament, the father
of the New, a father who disavows his child and regards it as a
rebellious bastard; for the Jews, faithful to the law of Moses,
regard with detestation the Christianity that has been reared on the
ruins of their law. The Christians, however, have with great subtlety
sought to justify the New Testament by the Old. The two religions
thus fight each other with the same weapons; they invoke the same
prophets and appeal to the same predictions.

Will the ages to come, which will have seen the passing of these
follies, yet may, unhappily, witness the rise of others not less
unworthy of God and men, believe that Judaism and Christianity
based their claims on such foundations and such prophecies? What
prophecies! Listen. The prophet Isaiah is summoned by Ahaz, king
of Judah, to make certain predictions to him, in the vain and
superstitious manner of the East. These prophets were, as you know,
men who earned more or less of a living by divination; there were
many like them in Europe in the last century, especially among the
common people. King Ahaz, besieged in Jerusalem by Shalmaneser, who
had taken Samaria, demanded of the soothsayer a prophecy and a sign.
Isaiah said to him: This is the sign:

“A girl will conceive, and will bear a child who shall be called
Emmanuel. He shall eat butter and honey until the day when he shall
reject evil and choose good; and before this child is of age, the
land which thou detestest shall be forsaken by its two kings; and the
Lord shall hiss for the flies that are on the banks of the streams of
Egypt and Assyria; and the Lord will take a razor, and shave the King
of Assyria; he will shave his head and the hair of his feet.”

After this splendid prophecy, recorded in _Isaiah_, but of which
there is not a word in _Kings_, the prophet orders him first to
write on a large roll, which they hasten to seal. He urges the king
to press to the plunder of his enemies, and then ensures the birth
of the predicted child. Instead of calling it Emmanuel, however, he
gives it the name of Maher Salabas. This, my brethren, is the passage
which Christians have distorted in favour of their Christ; this is
the prophecy that set up Christianity. The girl to whom the prophet
ascribes a child is incontestably the Virgin Mary.[63] Maher Salabas
is Jesus Christ. As to the butter and honey, I am unaware what it
means. Each soothsayer promises the Jews deliverance when they are
captive; and this deliverance is, according to the Christians,
the heavenly Jerusalem, and the Church of our time. Prophecy is
everything with the Jews; with the Christians miracle is everything,
and all the prophecies are figures of Jesus Christ.

Here, my brethren, is one of these fine and striking prophecies. The
great prophet Ezekiel sees a wind from the north, and four animals,
and wheels of chrysolite full of eyes; and the Lord says to him:
“Rise, eat a book, and then depart.”

The Lord orders him to sleep three hundred and ninety days on the
left side, and then forty on the right side. The Lord binds him with
cords; he was certainly a man that needed binding. What follows in
Ezekiel is very distasteful.

But we need not waste our time in assailing all the disgusting and
abominable dreams which are the subject of controversy between the
Jews and Christians. We will be content to deplore the most pitiful
blindness that has ever darkened the mind of man. Let us hope that
this blindness will pass like so many others, and let us proceed to
the New Testament, a worthy sequel to what has gone before.


                            _Third Point_

Vain was it that the Jews were a little more enlightened in the time
of Augustus than in the barbaric ages of which we have spoken. Vainly
did the Jews begin to recognise the immortality of the soul, a dogma
unknown to Moses, and the idea of God rewarding the just after death
and punishing the wicked, a dogma equally unknown to Moses. Reason
none the less penetrated this miserable people, from whom issued the
Christian religion, which has proved the source of so many divisions,
civil wars, and crimes; which has caused so much blood to flow; and
which is broken into so many sects in the corner of the earth where
it rules.

There were at all times among the Jews people of the lowest order,
who made prophecies in order to distinguish themselves from the
populace. We deal here with the one who has become best known, and
has been turned into a god; we give a brief account of his career, as
it is described in the books called the gospels. We need not seek to
determine when these books were written; it is evident that they were
written after the fall of Jerusalem. You know how absurdly the four
authors contradict each other. It is a demonstrative proof that they
are wrong. We do not, however, need many proofs to demolish this
miserable structure. We will be content with a short and faithful
account.

In the first place, Jesus is described as a descendant of Abraham and
David, and the writer Matthew counts forty-two generations in two
thousand years. In his list, however, we find only forty-one, and
in the genealogical tree which he borrows from _Kings_ he blunders
clumsily in making Josiah the father of Jechoniah.

Luke also gives a genealogy, but he assigns forty-nine generations
after Abraham, and they are entirely different generations. To
complete the absurdity, these generations belong to Joseph, and the
evangelists assure us that Jesus was not the son of Joseph. Would one
be received in a German chapter on such proofs of nobility? Yet there
is question here of the son of God, and God himself is the author of
the book!

Matthew says that when Jesus, King of the Jews, was born in a stable
in the town of Bethlehem, three magi or kings saw his star in the
east, and followed it, until it halted over Bethlehem; and that King
Herod, hearing these things, caused all the children under two years
of age to be put to death. Could any horror be more ridiculous?
Matthew adds that the father and mother took the child into Egypt,
and remained there until the death of Herod. Luke says precisely the
contrary; he observes that Joseph and Mary remained peacefully at
Bethlehem for six weeks, then went to Jerusalem, and from there to
Nazareth; and that they went every year to Jerusalem.

The evangelists contradict each other in regard to the time of
the life of Jesus, his miracles, the night of the supper, and the
day of his death--in a word, in regard to nearly all the facts.
There were forty-nine gospels composed by the Christians of the
first few centuries, and these were still more flagrant in their
contradictions. In the end, the four which we have were selected.
Even if they were in harmony, what folly, what misery, what puerile
and odious things they contain!

The first adventure of Jesus, son of God, is to be taken up by the
devil; the devil, who makes no appearance in the books of Moses,
plays a great part in the gospels. The devil, then, takes God up a
mountain in the desert. From there he shows him all the kingdoms of
the earth. Where is this mountain from which one can see so many
lands? We do not know.

John records that Jesus goes to a marriage-feast, and changes water
into wine; and that he drives from the precincts of the temple those
who were selling the animals of the sacrifices ordered in the Jewish
law.

All diseases were at that time regarded as possession by the devil,
and Jesus makes it the mission of his apostles to expel devils. As
he goes along, he delivers one who was possessed by a legion of
devils, and he makes these devils enter a herd of swine, which cast
themselves into the sea of Tiberias. We may suppose that the owners
of the swine, who were not Jews apparently, were not pleased with
this comedy. He heals a blind man, and the blind man sees men as if
they were trees. He wishes to eat figs in winter, and, not finding
any on a tree, he curses the tree and causes it to wither; the text
prudently adds: “For it was not the season of figs.”

He is transformed during the night, and causes Moses and Elias to
appear. Do the stories of romancers even approach these absurdities?
At length, after constantly insulting the Pharisees, calling them
“races of vipers,” “whitened sepulchres,” etc., he is handed over by
them to justice, and executed with two thieves; and the historians
are bold enough to tell us that at his death the earth was darkened
at midday, and at a time of full moon. As if every writer of the time
would not have mentioned so strange a miracle.

After that it is a small matter to make him rise from the dead and
predict the end of the world; which, however, has not happened.

The sect of Jesus lingers in concealment; fanaticism increases.
At first they dare not make a god of this man, but they soon take
courage. Some Platonic metaphysic amalgamates with the Nazaræan sect,
and Jesus becomes the logos, the word of God, then consubstantial
with God his father. The Trinity is invented; and, in order to have
it accepted, the first gospels are falsified.

A passage is added in regard to this truth, and the historian
Josephus is falsified and made to speak of Jesus, though Josephus is
too serious an historian to mention such a man. They go so far as
to forge sibylline books. In a word, there is no kind of trickery,
fraud, and imposture that the Nazaræans do not adopt. At the end of
three years they succeeded in having Jesus recognised as a god. Not
content with this extravagance, they go so far as to locate their god
in a bit of paste. While their god is eaten by mice and digested,
they hold that there is no such thing as bread in the host; that God
has, at the word of a man, put himself in the place of the bread. All
kinds of superstitions flood the Church; plunder is predominant in
it; indulgences, benefices, and all kinds of spiritual things are put
up for sale.

The sect splits into a multitude of sects; age after age they fight
and slaughter each other. At every dispute kings and princes are
massacred.

Such, my dear brethren, is the fruit of the tree of the Cross, the
power that has been declared divine.

For this they have dared to bring God upon the earth; to commit
Europe for ages to murder and brigandage. It is true that our fathers
have in part shaken off this frightful yoke, and rid themselves of
some errors and superstitions. But how imperfect they have left
the work! Everything tells us that it is time to complete it; to
destroy utterly the idol of which we have as yet broken only a finger
or two. Numbers of theologians have already embraced Socinianism
(Unitarianism), which comes near to the worship of one God, freed
from superstition. England, Germany, and the provinces of France are
full of wise doctors, who ask only the opportunity to break away.
There are great numbers in other countries. Why persist in teaching
what we do not believe, and make ourselves guilty before God of this
great sin?

We are told that the people need mysteries, and must be deceived.
My brethren, dare any one commit this outrage on humanity? Have not
our fathers already taken from the people their transubstantiation,
auricular confession, indulgences, exorcisms, false miracles, and
ridiculous statues? Are not the people accustomed to the deprivation
of this food of superstition? We must have the courage to go a few
steps farther. The people are not so weak of mind as is thought;
they will easily admit a wise and simple cult of one God, such as
was professed, it is said, by Abraham and Noah, and by all the sages
of antiquity, and as is found among the educated people of China.
We seek not to despoil the clergy of what the liberality of their
followers has given them; we wish them, since most of them secretly
laugh at the untruths they teach, to join us in preaching the truth.
Let them observe that, while they now offend and dishonour the
Deity, they would, if they follow us, glorify him. What incalculable
good would be done by that happy change? Princes and magistrates
would be better obeyed, the people would be tranquil, the spirit
of division and hatred would be expelled. They would offer to God,
in peace, the first fruits of their work. There would assuredly be
more righteousness on the earth, for many weak-minded folk who hear
contempt expressed daily for the Christian superstition, and know
that it is ridiculed by the priests themselves, thoughtlessly imagine
that there is no such thing as religion, and abandon themselves to
excesses. But when they learn that the Christian sect is really only
a perversion of natural religion; when reason, freed from its chains,
teaches the people that there is but one God; that this God is the
common parent of all men, who are brothers; that, as brothers, they
must be good and just to each other, and practise every virtue; that
God, being good and just, must reward virtue and punish crime; then
assuredly, my brethren, men will gain in righteousness as they lose
in superstition.

We begin by giving this example in secret, and we trust that it will
be followed in public.

May the great God who hears me--a God who certainly could not be born
of a girl, nor die on a gibbet, nor be eaten in a morsel of paste,
nor have inspired this book with its contradictions, follies, and
horrors--may this God, creator of all worlds, have pity on the sect
of the Christians who blaspheme him. May he bring them to the holy
and natural religion, and shower his blessing on the efforts we make
to have him worshipped. Amen.




                       THE QUESTIONS OF ZAPATA

            (TRANSLATED BY DR. TAMPONET, OF THE SORBONNE)

  _The licentiate Zapata, being appointed Professor of Theology
  at the University of Salamanca, presented these questions to a
  committee of doctors in 1629. They were suppressed. The Spanish
  copy is in the Brunswick Library._


WISE MASTERS:

1º. How ought I to proceed with the object of showing that the Jews,
whom we burn by the hundred, were for four thousand years God’s
chosen people?

2º. How could God, whom one cannot without blasphemy regard as
unjust, forsake the whole earth for the little Jewish tribe, and then
abandon this little group for another, which, during two hundred
years, was even smaller and more despised?

3º. Why did he perform a number of incomprehensible miracles in
favour of this miserable nation before the period which is called
_historical_? Why did he, some centuries ago, cease to perform them?
And why do we, who are God’s people, never witness any?

4º. If God is the God of Abraham, why do you burn the children of
Abraham? And, when you burn them, why do you recite their prayers?
How is it that, since you worship the book of their law, you put them
to death for observing that law?

5º. How shall I reconcile the chronology of the Chinese, Chaldæans,
Phœnicians, and Egyptians with that of the Jews? And how shall I
reconcile the forty different methods of calculation which I find in
the commentators? If I say that God dictated the book, I may be told
that God evidently is not an expert in chronology.

6º. By what argument can I prove that the books attributed to Moses
were written by him in the desert? How could he say that he wrote
beyond the Jordan when he never crossed the Jordan? I may be told
that God is evidently not good at geography.

7º. The book entitled _Joshua_ says that Joshua had _Deuteronomy_
engraved on stones coated with mortar; this passage in _Joshua_,
and others in ancient writers, clearly prove that in the days of
Moses and Joshua the peoples of the East engraved their laws and
observations on stone and brick. The Pentateuch tells us that the
Jewish people were without food and clothing in the desert; it seems
hardly probable that, if they had no tailors or shoemakers, they had
men who were able to engrave a large book. In any case, how did they
preserve this large work inscribed in mortar?

8º. What is the best way to refute the objections of the learned men
who find in the Pentateuch the names of towns which were not yet in
existence; precepts for kings whom the Jews detested, and who did not
reign until seven hundred years after Moses; and passages in which
the author betrays that he was much later than Moses, as: “The bed of
Og, which is still seen in Ramath,” “The Canaanite was then in the
land,” etc., etc., etc., etc.?

These learned men might, with the difficulties and contradictions
which they impute to the Jewish chronicles, give some trouble to a
licentiate.

9º. Is the book of _Genesis_ to be taken literally or allegorically?
Did God really take a rib from Adam and make woman therewith? and, if
so, why is it previously stated that he made man male and female? How
did God create light before the sun? How did he separate light from
darkness, since darkness is merely the absence of light? How could
there be a day before the sun was made? How was the firmament made
amid the waters, since there is no such thing as a firmament?--it
is an illusion of the ancient Greeks. There are those who suggest
that _Genesis_ was not written until the Jews had some knowledge of
the erroneous philosophy of other peoples, and it would pain me to
hear it said that God knows no more about physics than he does about
chronology and geography.

10º. What shall I say of the garden of Eden, from which issued a
river which divided into four rivers--the Tigris, Euphrates, Phison
(which is believed to be the Phasis), and Gihon, which flows in
Ethiopia, and must therefore be the Nile, the source of which is a
thousand miles from the source of the Euphrates? I shall be told once
more that God is a very poor geographer.

11º. I should, with all my heart, like to eat the fruit which hung
from the tree of knowledge; and it seems to me that the prohibition
to eat it is strange. Since God endowed man with reason, he ought
to encourage him to advance in knowledge. Did he wish to be served
only by fools? I should also like to have speech with the serpent,
since it was so intelligent; but I should like to know what language
it spoke. The Emperor Julian, a great philosopher, asked this of the
great St. Cyril, who could not meet the question, and said to the
learned emperor: “You are the serpent.” St. Cyril was not polite;
but you will observe that he did not perpetrate this theological
impertinence until Julian was dead.

_Genesis_ says that the serpent eats earth; you know that _Genesis_
is wrong, and that earth alone contains no nourishment. In regard
to God walking familiarly every day in the garden, and talking to
Adam and Eve and the serpent, I may say that it would have been very
pleasant to have been there. But as I think you are much more fitted
for the kind of society which Joseph and Mary had in the stable
at Bethlehem, I will not advise you to visit the garden of Eden,
especially as the gate is now guarded by a cherub armed to the teeth.
It is true that, according to the rabbis, _cherub_ means “ox.”[64] A
curious kind of porter! Please let me know at least what a cherub is.

12º. How shall I explain the story of the angels who fell in love
with the daughters of men, and begot giants? May I not be told
that this episode is borrowed from pagan legends? But as the Jews
invented everything in the desert, and were very ingenious, it is
clear that all the other nations took their science from the Jews.
Homer, Plato, Cicero, and Vergil learned all they knew from the Jews.
Is not that proved?

13º. How shall I get out of the deluge, the cataracts of heaven
(which has no cataracts), and the animals coming from Japan, Africa,
America, and the south, and being enclosed in a large ark with food
and drink for one year, without counting the time when the earth was
still too damp to produce food for them? How did Noah’s little family
manage to give all these animals their proper food? It consisted only
of eight persons.

14º. How can I make the story of the tower of Babel plausible? This
tower must have been higher than the pyramids of Egypt, since God
allowed the building of the pyramids. Did it reach as high as Venus,
or at least to the moon?

15º. By what device shall I justify the two lies of Abraham, the
father of believers, who, at the age of one hundred and thirty-five
(counting carefully), represented the pretty Sarah as his sister in
Egypt and at Gerar, in order that the kings of those countries might
fall in love with her and make presents to him? What a naughty thing
to do, to sell one’s wife!

16º. Give me some explanation why, although God told Abraham that all
his posterity should be circumcised, this was not done under Moses.

17º. Can I know by my natural powers whether the three angels, to
whom Sarah offered a whole calf to eat, had bodies, or borrowed
bodies?

18º. Will my hearers believe me when I tell them that Lot’s wife
was changed into a salt statue? What shall I say to those who tell
me that it is probably a coarse imitation of the ancient fable of
Eurydice, and that a salt statue would not last in the rain?

19º. What shall I say in justification of the blessings which fell
on Jacob, the just man, who deceived his father Isaac and robbed his
father-in-law Laban? How shall I explain God appearing to him at the
top of a ladder? And how could Jacob fight an angel all night?, etc.,
etc.

20º. How must I treat the sojourn of the Jews in Egypt and their
escape? _Exodus_ says that they remained four hundred years in Egypt;
but, counting carefully, we find only two hundred and five years. Why
did Pharaoh’s daughter bathe in the Nile, in which no one ever bathes
on account of the crocodiles?, etc., etc.

21º. Moses having wedded the daughter of an idolater, how could
God choose him as his prophet without reproaching him? How could
Pharaoh’s magicians work the same miracles as Moses, except that of
covering the land with lice and vermin? How could they change into
blood all the waters, since these had already been changed into
blood by Moses? How was it that Moses, led by God himself, and at
the head of six hundred and thirty thousand fighting men, fled with
his people, instead of taking Egypt, in which God had slain all the
first-born? Egypt never had an army of a hundred thousand men,
from the first mention of it in historical times. How was it that
Moses, flying with his troops from the land of Goshen, crossed half
of Egypt, instead of going straight to Canaan, and advanced as far
as Memphis, between Baal-Sephon and the Red Sea? Finally, how could
Pharaoh pursue him with all his cavalry when, in the fifth plague
of Egypt, God had just destroyed all the horses and beasts in the
country, and, moreover, Egypt, which is much broken by canals, always
had very little cavalry?

22º. How shall I reconcile what is said in _Exodus_ with the speech
of St. Stephen in _Acts_ and the passages of _Jeremiah_ and _Amos_?
_Exodus_ says that they sacrificed to Jehovah for forty years in the
desert; Jeremiah, Amos, and St. Stephen say that neither sacrifice
nor victim was offered during all that time. _Exodus_ says that they
made the tabernacle, which contained the ark of the covenant; St.
Stephen, in _Acts_, says that they took the tabernacle from Moloch
and Remphan.

23º. I am not sufficiently versed in chemistry to deal happily with
the golden calf which, _Exodus_ says, was made in a day, and which
Moses reduced to ashes. Are they two miracles, or two possibilities
of human art?

24º. Was it a further miracle for the leader of a nation, in a
desert, to have twenty-three thousand men of that nation slain by a
single one of the twelve tribes, and for twenty-three thousand men to
let themselves be massacred without making any defence?

25º. Must I again regard it as a miracle, or as an act of ordinary
justice, that twenty-four thousand Hebrews were put to death because
one of them had lain with a Midianite woman, while Moses himself had
married a Midianite? And were not these Hebrews, who are described
to us as so ferocious, really very good fellows to let themselves be
slain for girls?

26º. What explanation shall I give of the law which forbids the
eating of the hare “because it ruminates, and has not a cloven
foot,” whereas hares have cloven feet and do not ruminate? We have
already seen that this remarkable book suggests that God is a poor
geographer, a poor chronologist, and a poor physicist; he seems
to have been no less weak in natural history. How can I explain
other equally wise laws, such as that of the waters of jealousy and
the sentence of death on a man who lies with his wife during the
menstrual period? etc., etc., etc. Can I justify these barbaric and
ridiculous laws, which are said to have been given by God himself?

27º. What answer shall I make to those who are surprised that a
miracle was needed to effect the crossing of the Jordan, since it is
only forty-five feet across at its widest, could easily be crossed
with a small raft, and was fordable at many points, as we learn from
the slaying of forty-two thousand Ephraimites by their brothers at a
ford of the same river?

28º. What reply shall I make to those who ask how the walls of
Jericho fell at the sound of a trumpet, and why other towns did not
fall in the same way?

29º. How shall I excuse the conduct of the harlot Rahab in betraying
her country, Jericho? How was this treachery necessary, since they
had only to blow their trumpet to take a town? And how shall I fathom
the depth of the divine decrees which enacted that our divine Saviour
Jesus Christ should descend from this harlot Rahab, from the incest
of Thamar with her father-in-law Judah, and from the adultery of
David and Bathsheba? How incomprehensible are the ways of God!

30º. How can I approve of Joshua hanging thirty-one kinglets and
usurping their little States--that is to say, their villages?

31º. How shall I speak of the battle of Joshua with the Amorites at
Beth-horon on the way to Gibeon? The Lord sends a rain of stones,
from Beth-horon to Azekah: it is fifteen miles from Beth-horon to
Azekah; therefore the Amorites were exterminated by rocks which fell
from heaven over a space of fifteen miles. The Scripture says that
it was midday. Why, then, did Joshua command the sun and the moon to
stand still in the middle of the sky in order to give him time to
complete the defeat of a small troop which was already exterminated?
Why did he tell the moon to stand still at midday? How could the sun
and moon remain in the same place for a day? Which commentator shall
I consult for an explanation of this extraordinary truth?

32º. What shall I say of Jephthah immolating his daughter, and having
forty-two thousand Jews of the tribe of Ephraim, who could not say
_Shibboleth_, put to death?

33º. Ought I to admit or deny that the Jewish law nowhere speaks of
punishment or reward after death? How is it that neither Moses nor
Joshua ever spoke of the immortality of the soul, a dogma well known
to the ancient Egyptians, Chaldæans, Persians, and Greeks, but hardly
known to the Jews until after the time of Alexander, and always
rejected by the Sadducees because it is not in the Pentateuch?

34º. What gloss must I put on the story of the Levite who, coming on
his ass to the Benjamite town Gibeah, excited the passion of all the
Gibeonites? He abandoned his wife to them, and she died the next day.

35º. I need your advice to enable me to understand the nineteenth
verse of the first chapter of _Judges_: “And the Lord was with Judah:
and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain: but could not
drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots
of iron.” I cannot, of my own feeble lights, understand how the God
of heaven and earth, who had so often superseded the order of nature
and suspended the eternal laws in favour of the Jewish people, was
unable to vanquish the inhabitants of a valley because they had iron
chariots. Can it be true that, as some learned men say, the Jews
at that time regarded their God as a local and protecting deity,
sometimes more powerful, at other times less powerful, than the gods
of the enemy? And is this not proved by the reply of Jephthah: “Ye
possess by right what your god Camos has given you: suffer then that
we take what our god Adonai has promised us”?

36º. I may add that it is difficult to believe that there were so
many chariots armed with scythes in a mountainous district, in which,
as the Scriptures often show, the height of magnificence was to be
mounted on an ass.[65]

37º. The story of Ehud gives me even greater trouble. I see that the
Jews were always in bondage, in spite of the help of their God, who
had sworn to give them all the country between the Nile, the sea,
and the Euphrates. For eighteen years they were subject to a petty
king named Eglon, when God raised up for them Ehud, son of Gera, who
used his left hand as well as the right. Ehud, son of Gera, made a
two-edged sword, and hid it under his cloak--as Jacques Clément and
Ravaillac did afterwards. He asks a private audience of the king,
saying that he has a secret of the utmost importance to communicate
to him from God. Eglon respectfully rises, and Ehud drives his
sword into his belly with his left hand. God entirely approved this
deed; but, judged by the moral code of all nations, it seems rather
questionable. Please tell me which was the most divine assassination,
that of St. Ehud, or that of St. David (who had Uriah, the husband
of his mistress, slain), or that of the blessed Solomon, who, having
seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, assassinated his
brother Adonias because he asked for one of them? etc., etc., etc.,
etc.

38º. I pray you tell me by what trick Samson caught three hundred
foxes, tied them together by their tails, and fastened lighted
torches to their hind quarters, in order to set fire to the harvests
of the Philistines. Foxes are found only in wooded country. There was
no forest in this district, and it seems rather difficult to catch
three hundred foxes alive and tie them together by their tails. It is
then said that he killed a thousand Philistines with the jaw of an
ass, and that a spring issued from one of the teeth of this jaw. When
it comes to the jaws of asses, you certainly owe me explanations.

39º. I also ask you for information about that good man Tobias, who
slept with his eyes open, and was blinded by the droppings of a
swallow; about the angel who came down expressly from what is called
the empyrean to seek, with Tobias junior, the money which the Jew
Gabel owed to Tobias senior; about the wife of Tobias junior, who had
had seven husbands whose necks had been wrung by the devil; and about
the way to restore sight to the blind with the gall of a fish. These
stories are curious, and nothing is more worthy of attention--after
Spanish novels; the only things to which they may be compared are the
stories of Judith and Esther. But how am I to interpret the sacred
text which says that the beautiful Judith descended from Simeon, son
of Reuben, whereas Simeon was the brother of Reuben, according to the
same sacred text, which cannot lie?

I am very fond of Esther, and think the alleged King Assuerus acted
very sensibly in marrying a Jewess and living with her for six
months without knowing who she was. As all the rest of the story
is of much the same character, I must ask you kindly to come to my
assistance, my wise masters.

40º. I need your help in regard to the history of the kings, at
least as much as in regard to the history of the judges, of Tobias
and his dog, of Esther, of Judith, of Ruth, etc., etc. When Saul was
appointed king, the Jews were in bondage to the Philistines. Their
conquerors did not allow them to have swords or lances; they were
even compelled to go to the Philistines to have their ploughshares
and axes sharpened. Nevertheless, Saul gives battle to the
Philistines and defeats them; and in this battle he is at the head of
three hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, in a little country that
cannot sustain thirty thousand souls. The Jews had not at that time
more than a third of Palestine, at the most, and so sterile a country
does not sustain twenty thousand inhabitants to-day. The surplus
population was compelled to go and earn its living by prostitution at
Damascus, Tyre, and Babylon.

41º. I know not how I can justify the conduct of Samuel in cutting
into pieces Agag, whom Saul had taken prisoner and put to ransom. I
wonder whether our king Philip, if he captured a Moorish king, and
made an agreement with him, would be approved if he cut the captured
king in pieces.

42º. We owe great respect to David, who was a man after God’s heart;
but I fear I am not learned enough to justify, by ordinary laws,
the conduct of David in associating with four hundred men of evil
ways, and burdened with debt, as the Scripture says; in going to
sack the house of the king’s servant Nabal, and marrying his widow
a week later; in offering his services to Achish, the king’s enemy,
and spreading fire and blood over the land of the allies of Achish,
without sparing either age or sex; in taking new concubines as soon
as he is on the throne; and, not content with these concubines, in
stealing Bathsheba from her husband, whom he not only dishonours,
but slays. I find it difficult to imagine how God could afterwards
descend, in Judæa, from this adulterous and homicidal woman, who is
counted among the ancestresses of the Eternal. I have already warned
you that this article causes much trouble to pious souls.

43º. The wealth of David and Solomon, which amounted to more than
five hundred thousand million gold ducats, seems to be not easily
reconciled with the poverty of the country and with the condition to
which the Jews were reduced under Saul, when they had not the means
of sharpening their ploughshares and axes. Our cavalry officers will
shrug their shoulders when I tell them that Solomon had four hundred
thousand horses in a little country where there never were, and are
not to-day, anything but asses, as I have already had the honour to
represent to you.

44º. If I were to run over the history of the frightful cruelties of
nearly all the kings of Judah and Israel, I fear I should scandalise,
rather than edify, the weak. These kings assassinate each other a
little too frequently. It is bad politics, if I am not mistaken.

45º. I see this small people almost always in bondage to the
Phœnicians, Babylonians, Persians, Syrians, or Romans; and I may
have some trouble in reconciling so much misery with the magnificent
promises of their prophets.

46º. I know that all the eastern nations had prophets, but I do not
quite understand those of the Jews. What is the meaning of the vision
of Ezekiel, son of Buzi, near the river Chebar; of the four animals
which had four faces and four wings each, with the feet of calves; of
the wheel that had four faces; and of the firmament above the heads
of the animals? How can we explain the order given by God to Ezekiel
to eat a parchment book, to have himself bound, and to lie on his
left side for three hundred and ninety days, and on his right side
for forty days?

47º. It will be my duty to explain the great prophecy of Isaiah in
regard to our Lord Jesus Christ. It is, as you know, in the seventh
chapter. Rezin, king of Syria, and Pekah, kinglet of Israel, were
besieging Jerusalem. Ahaz, kinglet of Jerusalem, consults the prophet
Isaiah as to the issue of the siege. Isaiah replies: “God shall give
you a sign: a girl (or woman) shall conceive and bear a son, and
shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he
may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child
shall be able to refuse the evil and choose the good the land shall
be delivered of both the kings, ... and the Lord shall hiss for the
fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the
bee that is in the land of Assyria.”

Then, in the eighth chapter, the prophet, to ensure the fulfilment
of the prophecy, lies with the prophetess. She bore a son, and
the Lord said to Isaiah: “Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz
[Hasten-to-seize-the-spoil, or Run-quickly-to-the-booty]. For before
the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father and my mother, the
power of Damascus shall be overthrown.” I cannot plainly interpret
this prophecy without your assistance.

48º. How must I understand the story of Jonah, who was sent to
Nineveh to preach penance? Nineveh was not Israelitic, and it seems
that Jonah was to instruct it in the Jewish law before bringing it
to repent. Instead of obeying the Lord, Jonah flies to Tarshish. A
storm arises, and the sailors throw Jonah into the sea to appease
the tempest. God sends a great fish to swallow Jonah, and he remains
three days and three nights in the belly of the fish. God orders the
fish to give up Jonah, and it obeys. Jonah disembarks on the coast
of Joppa. God commands him to go and tell Nineveh that in forty days
it will be overturned, unless it does penance. It is more than four
hundred miles from Joppa to Nineveh. Do not all the stories demand
a superior knowledge which I lack? I greatly wish to confound the
learned men who assert that this legend is taken from the legend of
the ancient Hercules.

49º. Show me how to interpret the first verses of the prophet Hosea.
God explicitly enjoins him to take a harlot and have children by
her. The prophet obeys punctually. He pays his respects to Dona
Gomer, daughter of Dom Diblaim, keeps her three years, and has three
children--which is a model. Then God desires another model. He orders
him to lie with another gay lady, a married woman, who has already
deceived her husband. The good Hosea, always obedient, has no trouble
in finding a handsome lady of this character, and it costs him only
fifteen pieces of silver and a measure of barley. I beg you to tell
me how much the piece of silver was worth among the Jews.

50º. I have still greater need of your wise guidance in regard to the
New Testament. I hardly know what to say when I have to reconcile
the two genealogies of Jesus. I shall be reminded that Matthew makes
Jacob the father of Joseph, while Luke makes him the son of Heli,
and that this is impossible unless we change _He_ into _Ja_ and _li_
into _cob_. I shall be asked why the one counts fifty-six generations
and the other only forty-two, and why the generations are quite
different; and then why only forty-one are given instead of the
promised forty-two; and lastly why the genealogical tree of Joseph
was given at all, seeing that he was not the father of Jesus. I fear
to make a fool of myself, as so many of my predecessors have done. I
trust that you will extricate me from this labyrinth.

51º. If I declare that, as Luke says, Augustus had ordered a census
to be taken of the whole earth when Mary was pregnant, and that
Cyrenius or Quirinus, the governor of Syria, published the decree,
and that Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem to be enumerated; and if
people laugh at me, and antiquarians teach me that there never was a
census of the Roman Empire, that Quintilius Varus, not Cyrenius, was
at that time governor of Syria, and that Cyrenius only governed Syria
ten years after the birth of Jesus, I shall be very much embarrassed,
and no doubt you will extricate me from this little difficulty. For
how could a book be inspired if there were one single untruth in it?

52º. When I teach that, as Matthew says, the family went into Egypt,
I shall be told that that is not true, but that, as the other
evangelists say, the family remained in Judæa; and if I then grant
that they remained in Judæa, I shall be told that they were in Egypt.
Is it not simpler to say that one can be in two places at once, as
happened to St. Francis Xavier and several other saints?

53º. Astronomers may laugh at the star which led the three kings
to a stable. But you are great astrologers, and will be able to
explain the phenomenon. Tell me, especially, how much gold the kings
presented. For you are wont to extort a good deal of it from kings
and peoples. And in regard to the fourth king, Herod, why did he
fear that Jesus, born in a stable, might become king of the Jews?
Herod was king only by permission of the Romans; it was the business
of Augustus. The massacre of the innocents is rather curious. I am
disappointed that no Roman writer mentions it. An ancient and most
truthful (as they all are) martyrology gives the number of these
martyred infants as fourteen thousand. If you would like me to add a
few thousand more, you have only to say so.

54º. You will tell me how the devil carried off God and perched him
on a hill in Galilee, from which one could see all the kingdoms of
the earth. The devil promising these kingdoms to God, provided God
worships the devil, may scandalise many good people, whom I recommend
to your notice.

55º. I beg you, when you go to a wedding feast, to tell me how God,
who also went to a wedding feast, succeeded in changing water into
wine for the sake of people who were already drunk.

56º. When you eat figs at breakfast towards the end of July, I
beg you to tell me why God, being hungry, looked for figs at the
beginning of the month of March, when it was not the season of figs.

57º. Having received your instructions on all the prodigies of this
nature, I shall have to say that God was condemned to be executed
for original sin. And if I am told that there was never any question
of original sin, either in the Old or the New Testament; that it is
merely stated that Adam was condemned to die on the day on which he
should eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and he did not die;
and that Augustine, bishop of Hippo, formerly a Manichean, was the
first to set up the doctrine of original sin, I submit to you that,
as my hearers are not the simple folk of Hippo, I run some risk of
exciting derision by speaking much without saying anything. When
certain cavillers came to show me that God could not possibly be
executed because an apple was eaten four thousand years before his
death, and could not possibly have redeemed the human race, yet,
apart from a chosen few, left the whole of it in the devil’s claws, I
had only verbiage to give in reply, and went away to hide my shame.

58º. Throw some light for me on the prophecy which Our Lord makes
in _Luke_ (ch. xxi.). Jesus says explicitly that he will come in
a cloud with great power and great glory before the generation to
which he speaks shall pass away. He did not do this; he did not come
in the clouds. If he came in some fog or other, we know nothing
about it; tell me what you think. The Apostle Paul also says to his
Thessalonian disciples that they will go with him in the clouds to
Jesus. Why did they not go? Does it cost more to go to the clouds
than to the third heaven? I beg your forgiveness, but I prefer the
clouds of Aristophanes to those of Paul.

59º. Shall I say with Luke that Jesus went up to heaven from the
little village of Bethany? Shall I state with Matthew that it was
from Galilee, where the disciples saw him for the last time? Or shall
I take the word of a learned doctor who says that Jesus had one foot
in Bethany and another in Galilee? The latter opinion seems to me the
more probable, but I will await your decision.

60º. I shall then be asked whether Peter was ever at Rome. I shall
reply, of course, that he was pope there for twenty-five years; and
the chief reason I shall give is that we have an epistle from the
good man (who could neither read nor write), and that it is dated
from Babylon. There is no answer to that argument, but I should like
something stronger.

61º. Please tell me why the “Apostles’ Creed” was not written until
the time of Jerome and Rufinus, four hundred years after the
apostles. Tell me why the earliest fathers of the Church never quote
any but the gospels which we call apocryphal. Is it not a clear proof
that the four canonical gospels had not yet been written?

62º. Are you not sorry, as I am, that the early Christians forged
so much bad poetry, and attributed it to the Sibyls? And that they
forged letters of Paul and Seneca, of Jesus, of Mary, and of Pilate?
And that they thus set up their sect on a hundred forgeries which
would be punished to-day by any court in the world? These frauds
are now recognised by all scholars. We are reduced to calling them
“pious.” But is it not sad that your truth should be based on lies?

63º. Tell me why, since Jesus did not institute seven sacraments,
we have seven sacraments[66]; why, whereas Jesus never said that he
was threefold and had two natures and two wills and one person, we
make him threefold, with one person and two natures; and why, having
two wills, he had not the will to instruct us in the dogmas of the
Christian religion.

64º. Is the pope infallible when he consorts with his mistress, and
when he brings to supper a bottle of poisoned wine for Cardinal
Cornetto?[67] When two councils anathematise each other, as has often
happened, which of them is infallible?

65º. Would it not really be better to avoid these labyrinths, and
simply preach virtue? When God comes to judge us, I doubt very
much if he will ask us whether grace is versatile or concomitant,
whether marriage is the visible sign of an invisible thing, whether
we believe that there are ten choirs of angels or nine, whether the
pope is above the council or the council above the pope. Will it be a
crime in his eyes to have prayed to him in Spanish when one does not
know Latin? Shall we be visited with his cruel wrath for having eaten
a penny-worth of bad meat on a certain day? And shall we be eternally
rewarded if, like you, my learned masters, we ate a hundred piastres’
worth of turbot, sole, and sturgeon? You do not believe it in the
depth of your hearts; you believe that God will judge you by your
works, not by the opinions of Thomas and Bonaventure.

Shall I not render a service to men in speaking to them only of
morality? This morality is so pure, so holy, so universal, so clear,
so ancient, that it seems to come from God himself, like the light
which we regard as the first of his works. Has he not given men
self-love to secure their preservation; benevolence, beneficence,
and virtue to control their self-love; the natural need to form a
society; pleasure to enjoy, pain to warn us to enjoy in moderation,
passions to spur us to great deeds, and wisdom to curb our passions?
Will you allow me to announce these truths to the noble people of
Spain?

66º. If you bid me conceal these truths, and strictly enjoin me
to announce the miracles of St. James of Galicia, or of Our Lady
of Atocha, or of Maria d’Agreda (who in her ecstasies behaved in
a most improper manner), tell me what I must do with those who
dare to doubt? Must I, for their edification, have the ordinary and
extraordinary question put to them?[68]

I await the honour of your reply,

                                           DOMINICO ZAPATA,
                                              y verdadero, y honrado,
                                                    y caricativo.

  Zapata, receiving no answer, took to preaching God in all
  simplicity. He announced to men the common father, the rewarder,
  punisher, and pardoner. He extricated the truth from the lies, and
  separated religion from fanaticism; he taught and practised virtue.
  He was gentle, kindly, and modest; and he was burned at Valladolid
  in the year of grace 1631. Pray God for the soul of Brother Zapata.




                         WE MUST TAKE SIDES;

                     OR, THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION


                            INTRODUCTION

It is not a question of taking sides between Russia and Turkey; for
these States will, sooner or later, come to an understanding without
my intervention.

It is not a question of declaring oneself in favour of one English
faction and against another; for they will soon have disappeared, to
make room for others.

I am not endeavouring to choose between Greek and Armenian
Christians, Eutychians and Jacobites, Christians who are called
Papists and Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, the primitive folk
called Quakers, Anabaptists, Jansenists, Molinists, Socinians,
Pietists, and so many other ’ists. I wish to live in peace with all
these gentlemen, whenever I may meet them, and never dispute with
them; because there is not a single one of them who, when he has a
crown to share with me, will not know his business perfectly, or who
would spend a single penny for the salvation of my soul or his own.

I am not going to take sides between the old and the new French
Parliaments; because in a few years there will be no question of
either of them.

Nor between the ancients and the moderns; because the trial would be
endless.

Nor between the Jansenists and the Molinists; because they exist no
longer, and, thank God, five or six thousand volumes have become as
useless as the works of St. Ephraim.

Nor between the partisans of the French and the Italian opera;
because it is a mere matter of fancy.

The subject I have in mind is but a trifle--namely, the question
whether there is or is not a God; and I am going to examine it in all
seriousness and good faith, because it interests me, and you also.


                                  I

                     OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION

Everything is in motion, everything acts and reacts, in nature.

Our sun turns on its axis with a rapidity that astonishes us; other
suns turn with the same speed, while countless swarms of planets
revolve round them in their orbits, and the blood circulates more
than twenty times an hour in the lowliest of our animals.

A straw that is borne on the wind tends naturally towards the centre
of the earth, just as the earth gravitates towards the sun, and the
sun towards the earth. The sea owes to the same laws its eternal
ebb and flow. In virtue of the same laws the vapours which form our
atmosphere rise continually from the earth, and fall again in dew,
rain, hail, snow, and thunder. Everything, even death, is active.
Corpses are decomposed, transformed into plants, and nourish the
living, which in their turn are the food of others. What is the
principle of this universal activity?

This principle must be unique. The unvarying uniformity of the laws
which control the march of the heavenly bodies, the movements of
our globe, every species and genus of animal, plant, and mineral,
indicates that there is one mover. If there were two, they would
either differ, or be opposed to each other, or like each other. If
they were different, there would be no harmony; if opposed, things
would destroy each other; if like, it would be as if there were only
one--a twofold employment.

I am encouraged in this belief that there can be but one principle,
one single mover, when I observe the constant and uniform laws of the
whole of nature.

The same gravitation reaches every globe, and causes them to tend
towards each other in direct proportion, not to their surfaces, which
might be the effect of an impelling fluid, but to their masses.

The square of the revolution of every planet is as the cube of
its distance from the sun (which proves, one may note, what Plato
had somehow divined, that the world is the work of the eternal
geometrician).

The rays of light are reflected and refracted from end to end of the
universe. All the truths of mathematics must be the same on the star
Sirius as in our little home.

If I glance at the animal world, I find that all quadrupeds, and
all wingless bipeds, reproduce their kind by the same process of
copulation, and all the females are viviparous.

All female birds lay eggs.

In each species there is the same manner of reproduction and feeding.

Each species of plants has the same basic qualities.

Assuredly the oak and the nut have come to no agreement to be born
and to grow in the same way, any more than Mars and Saturn have come
to an understanding to observe the same laws. There is, therefore,
a single, universal, and powerful intelligence, acting always by
invariable laws.

No one doubts that an armillary sphere, landscapes, drawings of
animals, or models in coloured wax, are the work of clever artists.
Is it possible for the copyists to be intelligent and the originals
not? This seems to me the strongest demonstration; I do not see how
it can be assailed.


                                 II

          OF THE NECESSARY AND ETERNAL PRINCIPLE OF ACTION

This single mover is very powerful, since it directs so vast and
complex a machine. It is very intelligent, since the smallest spring
of this machine cannot be equalled by us, who are intelligent beings.

It is a necessary being, since without it the machine would not
exist.

It is eternal, for it cannot be produced from nothing, which, being
nothing, can produce nothing; given the existence of something, it
is demonstrated that something has existed for all eternity. This
sublime truth has become trivial. So great has been the advance of
the human mind in our time, in spite of the efforts to brutalise us
which the masters of ignorance have made for so many centuries.


                                 III

                       WHAT IS THIS PRINCIPLE?

I cannot prove synthetically the existence of the principle of
action, the prime mover, the Supreme Being, as Dr. Clarke does. If
this method were in the power of man, Clarke was, perhaps, worthy to
employ it; but analysis seems to me more suitable for our poor ideas.
It is only by ascending the stream of eternity that I can attempt to
reach its source.

Having therefore recognised from movement that there is a mover;
having proved from action that there is a principle of action; I
seek the nature of this universal principle. And the first thing I
perceive, with secret distress but entire resignation, is that, being
an imperceptible part of the great whole; being, as Plato says in the
_Timæus_, a point between two eternities; it will be impossible for
me to understand this great whole, which hems me in on every side,
and its master.

Yet I am a little reassured on seeing that I am able to measure
the distance of the stars, and to recognise the course and the laws
which keep them in their orbits. I say to myself: Perhaps, if I use
my reason in good faith, I may succeed in discovering some ray of
probability to lighten me in the dark night of nature. And if this
faint dawn which I seek does not come to me, I shall be consoled
to think that my ignorance is invincible; that knowledge which is
forbidden me is assuredly useless to me; and that the great Being
will not punish me for having sought a knowledge of him and failed to
obtain it.


                                 IV

            WHERE IS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE? IS IT INFINITE?

I do not see the first motive and intelligent principle of the animal
called man, when he demonstrates a geometrical proposition or lifts
a burden. Yet I feel irresistibly that there is one in him, however
subordinate. I cannot discover whether this first principle is in his
heart, or in his head, or in his blood, or in his whole body. In the
same way I have detected a first principle in nature, and have seen
that it must necessarily be eternal. But where is it?

If it animates all existence, it is in all existence: that seems to
be beyond doubt. It is in all that exists, just as movement is in the
whole body of an animal, if one may use so poor a comparison.

But while it is in what exists, can it be in what does not exist?
Is the universe infinite? I am told that it is; but who will prove
it? I regard it as eternal, because it cannot have been made from
nothing; because the great principle, “nothing comes from nothing,”
is as true as that two and two make four; because, as we saw
elsewhere, it is an absurd contradiction to say that the active being
has spent an eternity without acting, the formative being has been
eternal without forming anything, and the necessary being has been,
during an eternity, a useless being.

But I see no reason why this necessary being should be infinite. Its
nature seems to me to be wherever there is existence; but why, and
how, an infinite existence? Newton has demonstrated the void, which
had until his time been a matter of conjecture. If there is a void in
nature, there may be a void outside nature. What need is there that
beings should extend to infinity? What would an infinite extension
be? Nor can we have infinity in number. There is no number and no
extension to which I cannot add. It seems to me that in this matter
the conclusion of Cudworth is preferable to that of Clarke.

God is present everywhere, says Clarke. Yes, doubtless; but
everywhere where there is something, not where there is not. To
be present in nothing seems to me a contradiction in terms, an
absurdity. I am compelled to admit eternity, but I am not compelled
to admit an actual infinity.

In fine, what does it matter to me whether space is a reality or
merely an idea in my mind? What does it matter whether or no the
necessary, intelligent, powerful, eternal being, the former of all
being, is in this imaginary space? Am I less his work? Am I less
dependent on him? Is he the less my master? I see this master of the
world with the eyes of my mind, but I see him not beyond the world.

It is still disputed whether or no infinite space is a reality. I
will not base my judgment on so equivocal a point, a quarrel worthy
of the scholastics. I will not set up the throne of God in imaginary
spaces.

If it is allowable to compare once more the little things which seem
large to us to what is great in reality, let us imagine a gentleman
of Madrid trying to persuade a Castilian neighbour that the king
of Spain is master of the sea to the north of California, and that
whoever doubts it is guilty of high treason. The Castilian replies:
I do not even know whether there is a sea beyond California. It
matters little to me whether there is or not, provided that I have
the means of subsistence in Madrid. I do not need this sea to be
discovered to make me faithful to the king my master on the banks of
the Manzanares. Whether or no there are vessels beyond Hudson Bay, he
has none the less power to command me here; I feel my dependence on
him in Madrid, because I know that he is master of Madrid.

In the same way, our dependence on the great being is not due to the
fact that he is present outside the world, but to the fact that he
is present in the world. I do but ask pardon of the master of nature
for comparing him to a frail human being in order to make my meaning
clearer.


                                  V

         THAT ALL THE WORKS OF THE ETERNAL BEING ARE ETERNAL

The principle of nature being necessary and eternal, and its very
essence being to act, it must have been always active. If it had not
been an ever-active God, it would have been an eternally indolent
God, the God of Epicurus, the God who is good for nothing. This truth
seems to me to be fully demonstrated.

Hence the world, his work, whatever form it assume, is, like him,
eternal; just as the light is as old as the sun, movement as old as
matter, and food as old as the animals; otherwise the sun, matter,
and the animals would be, not merely useless, but self-contradictory
things, chimæras.

What, indeed, could be more contradictory than an essentially active
being that has been inactive during an eternity; a formative being
that has fashioned nothing, or merely formed a few globes some years
ago, without there being the least apparent reason for making them
at one time rather than another? The intelligent principle can do
nothing without reason; nothing can exist without an antecedent and
necessary reason. This antecedent and necessary reason has existed
eternally; therefore the universe is eternal.

We speak here a strictly philosophical language; it is not our part
even to glance at those who use the language of revelation.


                                 VI

          THAT THE ETERNAL BEING, AND FIRST PRINCIPLE, HAS
                   ARRANGED ALL THINGS VOLUNTARILY

It is clear that this supreme, necessary, active intelligence is
possessed of will, and has arranged all things because it[69] willed
them. How can one act, and fashion all things, without willing to
fashion them? That would be the action of a mere machine, and this
machine would presuppose another first principle, another mover. We
should always have to end in a first intelligent being of some kind
or other. We wish, we act, we make machines, when we will; hence
the great very powerful _Demiourgos_ has done all things because he
willed.

Spinoza himself recognises in nature an intelligent, necessary power.
But an intelligence without will would be an absurdity, since such an
intelligence would be useless; it would do nothing, because it would
not will to do anything. Hence the great necessary being has willed
everything that it has done.

I said above that it has done all things necessarily because, if
its works were not necessary, they would be useless. But does this
necessity deprive it of will? Certainly not. I necessarily will to be
happy, but I will it none the less on that account; on the contrary,
I will it all the more strongly because I will it irresistibly.

Does this necessity deprive it of liberty? Not at all. Liberty can
only be the power to act. Since the supreme being is very powerful,
it is the freest of beings.

We thus recognise that the great artisan of things is necessary,
eternal, intelligent, powerful, possessed of will, and free.


                                 VII

   THAT ALL BEINGS, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, ARE SUBJECT TO ETERNAL LAWS

What are the effects of this eternal power that dwells essentially
in nature? I see only two classes of them, the insensitive and the
sensitive.

The earth, the seas, the planets, the suns, seem admirable but
lifeless things, devoid of sensibility. A snail that wills, has some
degree of perception, and makes love, seems, to that extent, to have
an advantage greater than all the glory of the suns that illumine
space.

But all these beings are alike subject to eternal and unvarying laws.

Neither the sun, nor the snail, nor the oyster, nor the dog, nor the
ape, nor man, has given himself any one of the things which he has;
it is evident that they have received everything.

Man and the dog are born, unwittingly, of a mother who has brought
them into the world in spite of herself. Both of them suck the
mother’s breast without knowing what they do, and they do this in
virtue of a very delicate and complex mechanism, the nature of which
is known to few men.

Both of them have, after a time, ideas, memory, and will; the dog
much earlier than the man.

If the animals were mere machines, it would be another argument for
the position of those who believe that man also is a mere machine;
but there are now none who do not admit that the animals have ideas,
memory, and a measure of intelligence, and that they improve their
knowledge; that a hunting-dog learns its work, an old fox is more
astute than a young one, and so on.

Whence have they these faculties, if not from the primordial eternal
cause, the principle of action, the great being that animates the
whole of nature?

Man obtains the faculties of the animals much later than they, but in
a higher degree; can he obtain them from any other source?

He has nothing but what the great being has given him. It would
be a strange contradiction, a singular absurdity, if all the
stars and elements, the animals and plants, obeyed, unceasingly
and irresistibly, the laws of the great being, and man alone were
independent of them.


                                VIII

            THAT MAN IS ESSENTIALLY SUBJECT IN EVERYTHING
             TO THE ETERNAL LAWS OF THE FIRST PRINCIPLE

Let us regard, with the eyes of reason, this animal man which the
great being has produced.

What is his first sensation? A sensation of pain; then the pleasure
of feeding. That is the whole of our life: pain and pleasure. Whence
have we these two springs which keep us in action until our last
moment, if not from this first principle of action, this Demiourgos?
Assuredly we do not give pain to ourselves; and how could we be
the cause of our few pleasures? We have said elsewhere that it is
impossible for us to invent a new kind of pleasure--that is to say,
a new sense. Let us now say that it is equally impossible for us to
invent a new kind of pain. The most execrable of tyrants cannot do
it. The Jews, whose tortures have been described by the Benedictine
monk Calmet in his dictionary, could only cut, tear, mutilate, draw,
burn, strangle, and crush; all torments may thus be summarised. We
can therefore do nothing of ourselves, either for good or evil; we
are but the blind instruments of nature.

But I wish to think and I think, most men will recklessly assert. Let
us consider it. What was our first idea after the feeling of pain?
The idea of the breast that we sucked; then the face of the nurse;
then a few other objects and needs made their faint impressions.
Would any one up to this point venture to say that he was more than
a sentient automaton, a wretched abandoned animal destitute of
knowledge or power, an outcast of nature? Will he venture to say
that in this condition he is a thinking being, the author of his own
ideas, the possessor of a soul? What is the son of a king when he
leaves the womb? He would excite the disgust of his father, if he
were not his father. A flower of the field that one treads underfoot
is an infinitely superior thing.


                                 IX

            OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION IN SENTIENT BEINGS

There comes at length a time when a greater or smaller number of
perceptions, received in our mechanism, seem to present themselves to
our will. We think that we are forming ideas. It is as if, when we
turn the tap of a fountain, we were to think that we cause the water
which streams out. We create ideas, poor creatures that we are! It
is evident that we had no share in the former, yet we would regard
ourselves as the authors of the latter. If we reflect well on this
vain boast of forming ideas, we shall see that it is insolent and
absurd.

Let us remember that there is nothing in external objects with the
least analogy, the least relation, to a feeling, an idea, a thought.
Let an eye or an ear be made by the best artisan in the world; the
eye will see nothing, the ear will hear nothing. It is the same with
our living body. The universal principle of action does everything in
us. He has not made us an exception to the rest of nature.

Two experiences which are constantly repeated during the course of
our life, and of which I have spoken elsewhere, will convince every
thoughtful man that our ideas, our wills, and our actions do not
belong to us.

The first is that no one knows, or can know, what idea he will have
at any minute, what desire he will have, what word he will speak,
what movement his body will perform.

The second is that during sleep it is clear that we have not the
least share in what takes place in our dreams. We grant that we are
then mere automata, on which an invisible power acts with a force
that is as real and powerful as it is incomprehensible. This power
fills the mind with ideas, inspires desires, passions, reflections.
It sets in motion all the organs of the body. It has happened at
times that a mother has smothered, in a restless dream, the new-born
child that lay by her side; that a man has killed his friend. How
many musicians have composed music during sleep? How many young
preachers have composed sermons during their sleep?

If our life were equally divided between waking and sleeping, instead
of our usually spending a third of our short career in sleep, and if
we always dreamed during sleep, it would then be evident that half of
our life did not depend on us. In any case, assuming that we spend
eight out of the twenty-four hours in sleep, it is plain that a third
of our existence is beyond our control. Add to this infancy, add all
the time that is occupied in purely animal functions, and see how
much is left. You will admit with surprise that at least half our
life does not belong to us at all. Then reflect how inconsistent it
would be if one half depended on us and the other half did not.

Conclude, therefore, that the universal principle of action does
everything in us.

Here the Jansenist interrupts me and says: “You are a plagiarist; you
have taken your doctrine from the famous book, _The Action of God
on Created Things, or Physical Premotion_, by our great patriarch
Boursier.” I have said somewhere of Boursier that he had dipped
his pen in the inkpot of the Deity. No, my friend; I have never
received anything from the Jansenists or the Molinists except a
strong aversion for sects, and some indifference to their opinions.
Boursier, taking God as his model, knows precisely what was the
nature of Adam’s dream when God took a rib from his side wherewith
to make woman; he knows the nature of his concupiscence, habitual
grace, and actual grace. He knows, with St. Augustine, that men and
women would have engendered children dispassionately in the earthly
paradise, just as one sows a field, without any feeling of carnal
pleasure. He is convinced that Adam sinned only by distraction in the
earthly paradise. I know nothing about these things, and am content
to admire those who have so splendid and profound a knowledge.


                                  X

             OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION CALLED THE SOUL

But, some centuries later in the history of man, it came to be
imagined that we have a soul which acts of itself; and the idea has
become so familiar that we take it for a reality.

We talk incessantly of “the soul,” though we have not the least idea
of the meaning of it.

To some the soul means the life; to others it is a small, frail
image of ourselves, which goes, when we die, to drink the waters of
Acheron; to others it is a harmony, a memory, an entelechy. In the
end it has been converted into a little being that is not body, a
breath that is not air; and of this word “breath,” which corresponds
to “spirit” in many tongues, a kind of thing has been made which is
nothing at all.

Who can fail to see that men uttered, and still utter, the word
“soul” vaguely and without understanding, as we utter the words
“movement,” “understanding,” “imagination,” “memory,” “desire,” and
“will”? There is no real being which we call will, desire, memory,
imagination, understanding, or movement; but the real being called
man understands, imagines, remembers, desires, wills, and moves.
They are abstract terms, invented for convenience of speech. I run,
I sleep, I awake; but there is no such physical reality as running,
sleep, or awakening. Neither sight, nor hearing, nor touch, nor
smell, nor taste, is a real being; I hear, I see, I smell, I taste, I
touch. And how could I do this if the great being had not so disposed
all things; if the principle of action, the universal cause--in one
word, God--had not given us these faculties?

We may be quite sure that there would be just as much reason to grant
the snail a hidden being called a “free soul” as to grant it to man.
The snail has a will, desires, tastes, sensations, ideas, and memory.
It wishes to move towards the material of its food or the object of
its love. It remembers it, has an idea of it, advances towards it
as quickly as it can; it knows pleasure and pain. Yet you are not
terrified when you are told that the animal has not a spiritual soul;
that God has bestowed on it these gifts for a little time; that he
who moves the stars moves also the insect. But when it comes to man
you change your mind. This poor animal seems to you so worthy of
your respect--that is to say, you are so proud--that you venture to
place in its frail body something that seems to share the nature of
God himself, yet something that seems to you at times diabolical
in the perversity of its thoughts; something wise and foolish,
good and execrable, heavenly and infernal, invisible, immortal,
incomprehensible. And you have familiarised yourself with this idea,
as you have grown accustomed to speak of movement, though there is no
such being as movement; as you use abstract words, though there are
no abstract beings.


                                 XI

       EXAMINATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION CALLED THE SOUL

There is, nevertheless, a principle of action in man. Yes, there
is one everywhere. But can this principle be anything else than a
spring, a secret first mover which is developed by the ever-active
first principle--a principle that is as powerful as it is secret,
as demonstrable as it is invisible, which we have recognised as the
essential cause in the whole of nature?

If you create movement or ideas because you will it, you are God for
the time being; for you have all the attributes of God--will, power,
and creation. Consider the absurdity into which you fall in making
yourself God.

You have to choose between these two alternatives: either to be God
whenever you will, or to depend continually on God. The first is
extravagant; the second alone is reasonable.

If there were in our body a little god called “the free soul,” which
becomes so frequently a little devil, this little god would have to
be regarded either as having been created from all eternity, or as
created at the moment of your conception, or during your embryonic
life, or at birth, or when you begin to feel. All these positions are
equally ridiculous.

A little subordinate god, existing uselessly during a past eternity
and descending into a body that often dies at birth, is the height of
absurdity.

If this little god-soul is supposed to be created at the moment of
conception, we must consider the master of nature, the being of
beings, continually occupied in watching assignations, attentive to
every intercourse of man and woman, ever ready to despatch a sentient
and thinking soul into a recess between the entrails. A fine lodging
for a little god! When the mother brings forth a still-born child,
what becomes of the god-soul that had been lodged in the abdomen?
Whither has it returned?

The same difficulties and absurdities, equally ridiculous and
revolting, and found in connection with each of the other
suppositions. The idea of a soul, as it is usually and thoughtlessly
conceived by people, is one of the most foolish things that has ever
been devised.

How much more reasonable, more decent, more respectful to the supreme
being, more in harmony with our nature, and therefore truer, is it
not to say:

“We are machines made successively by the eternal geometrician;
machines made like all the other animals, having the same organs, the
same needs, the same pleasures, the same pains; far superior to all
of them in many things, inferior to them in others; having received
from the great being a principle of action which we cannot penetrate;
receiving everything, giving ourselves nothing; and a million times
more subject to him than the clay is to the potter who moulds it”?

Once more, either man is a god or he is precisely as I have described
him.


                                 XII

         WHETHER THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION IN ANIMALS IS FREE

There is a principle of action in man and in every animal, just
as there is in every machine; and this first mover, this ultimate
spring, is necessarily eternally arranged by the master, otherwise
all would be chaos, and there would be no world.

Every animal, like every machine, necessarily and irresistibly
obeys the power that directs it. That is evident, and sufficiently
familiar. Every animal is possessed of will, and one must be a
fool to think that a dog following its master has not the will to
follow him. No doubt, it follows him irresistibly; but it follows
voluntarily. Does it follow freely? Yes, if nothing prevents it; that
is to say, it can follow, it wills to follow, and it follows. The
freedom to follow is not in its will, but in the power to walk that
is given to it. A nightingale wills to make its nest, and makes it
when it has found some moss. It had the freedom to construct this
cradle, just as it had freedom to sing when it desires, and has not
a chill. But was it free to have the desire? Did it will to will to
make its nest? Had it that absurd “liberty of indifference” which
theologians would describe as follows: “I neither will to make my
nest nor the contrary; it is a matter of complete indifference to
me; but I am going to will to make my nest solely for the sake of
willing, and without being determined to do it in any way, merely
to prove that I am free”? Such is the absurdity we find taught in
the schools. If the nightingale could speak, it would say to these
doctors: “I am irresistibly determined to nest, I will to nest, and I
nest; you are irresistibly determined to reason badly, and you fulfil
your destiny as I do mine.”

We will now see if man is free in any other sense.


                                XIII

                OF THE LIBERTY OF MAN, AND OF DESTINY

A ball that drives another, a hunting-dog that necessarily and
voluntarily follows a stag, a stag that leaps a great ditch not less
necessarily and voluntarily, a roe that gives birth to another roe,
which will bring a third into the world--these things are not more
irresistibly determined than we are to do all that we do. Let us
remember always how inconsistent and absurd it would be for one set
of things to be arranged and the other not.

Every present event is born of the past, and is father of the future;
otherwise the universe would be quite other than it is, as Leibnitz
has well said, more correct in this than in his pre-established
harmony.[70] The eternal chain can be neither broken nor entangled.
The great being who necessarily sustains it cannot let it hang
uncertainly, nor change it; for he would then no longer be the
necessary and immutable being, the being of beings; he would be
frail, inconstant, capricious; he would belie his nature, and exist
no longer.

Hence, an inevitable destiny is the law of nature, as the whole of
antiquity felt. The dread of depriving man of some false liberty,
robbing virtue of its merit, and relieving crime of its horror, has
at times alarmed tender souls; but as soon as they were enlightened
they returned to this great truth, that all things are enchained and
necessary.

Man is free, we repeat, when he can do what he wills to do; but he is
not free to will; it is impossible that he should will without cause.
If this cause is not infallibly followed by its effect, it is no
cause. It would not be more absurd for a cloud to say to the wind:
“I do not wish to be driven by you.” This truth can never injure
morality. Vice is always vice, as disease is always disease. It will
always be necessary to repress the wicked; if they are determined to
evil, we must reply that they are equally predestined to chastisement.

Let us make these truths clearer.


                                 XIV

         ABSURDITY OF WHAT IS CALLED LIBERTY OF INDIFFERENCE

What an admirable spectacle is that of the eternal destinies of all
beings chained to the throne of the maker of all worlds! I imagine a
time when it is not so, but a chimerical liberty makes every event
uncertain. I imagine that one of the substances intermediate between
us and the great being (there may be millions of such beings) comes
to consult the eternal being on the destiny of some of the enormous
globes that stand at such vast distances from us. The sovereign of
nature would be forced to reply: “I am not sovereign, I am not the
great necessary being; every little embryo is a master of destiny.
The whole world is free to will without any other cause than the
will. The future is uncertain; everything depends on caprice. I can
foresee nothing. This great whole, which you regarded as so regular,
is but a vast anarchy in which all is done without cause or reason. I
shall be very careful not to say to you that such and such a thing
will happen; for then the wicked folk who people the globes would do
the contrary to what I had foretold, if it were only from malice. Men
always dare to be jealous of their master, when he has not a power
so absolute as to take away the very faculty of jealousy; they are
pleased to see him fall into a trap. I am but weak and ignorant.
Appeal to one more powerful and more gifted than I.”

Possibly this allegory will avail more than any other argument to
arrest the partisans of this empty liberty of indifference, if there
still be any, and those who labour to reconcile foreknowledge with
this liberty, and those who, in the university of Salamanca or in
Bedlam, still speak of medicinal and concomitant grace.


                                 XV

     OF EVIL AND, IN THE FIRST PLACE, THE DESTRUCTION OF BEASTS

We have never had any idea of good and evil, save in relation to
ourselves. The sufferings of an animal seem to us evils, because,
being animals ourselves, we feel that we should excite compassion if
the same were done to us. We should have the same feeling for a tree
if we were told that it suffered torment when it was cut; and for a
stone if we learned that it suffers when it is dressed. But we should
pity the tree and the stone much less than the animal, because they
are less like us. Indeed, we soon cease to be touched by the awful
destiny of the beasts that are intended for our table. Children who
weep at the death of the first chicken they see killed laugh at the
death of the second.

It is only too sure that the disgusting carnage of our butcheries and
kitchens does not seem to us an evil. On the contrary, we regard this
horror, pestilential as it often is, as a blessing of the Lord; and
we still have prayers in which we thank him for these murders. Yet
what can be more abominable than to feed constantly on corpses?

Not only do we spend our lives in killing, and devouring what we have
killed, but all the animals slaughter each other; they are impelled
to do so by an invincible instinct. From the smallest insects to the
rhinoceros and the elephant, the earth is but a vast battle-field, a
world of carnage and destruction. There is no animal that has not its
prey, and that, to capture it, does not employ some means equivalent
to the ruse and rage with which the detestable spider entraps and
devours the innocent fly. A flock of sheep devours in an hour, as it
crops the grass, more insects than there are men on the earth.

What is still more cruel is that in this horrible scene of
reiterated murder we perceive an evident design to perpetuate all
species by means of the bloody corpses of their mutual enemies.
The victims do not expire until nature has carefully provided for
new representatives of the species. Everything is born again to be
murdered.

Yet I observe no moralist among us, nor any of our fluent preachers
or boasters, who has ever reflected in the least on this frightful
habit, which has become part of our nature. We have to go back to the
pious Porphyry and the sympathetic Pythagoreans to find those who
would shame us for our bloody gluttony; or we must travel to the land
of the Brahmans. Our monks, the caprice of whose founders has bade
them renounce the flesh, are murderers of soles and turbots, if not
of partridges and quails. Neither among the monks, nor in the Council
of Trent, nor in the assemblies of the clergy, nor in our academies,
has this universal butchery ever been pronounced an evil. There has
been no more thought given to it in the councils of the clergy than
in our public-houses.

Hence the great being is justified of these butcheries in our eyes;
or, indeed, we are his accomplices.


                                 XVI

                  OF EVIL IN THE ANIMAL CALLED MAN

So much for the beasts; let us come to man. If it be not an evil that
the only being on earth that knows God by his thoughts should be
unhappy in his thoughts; if it be not an evil that this worshipper of
the Deity should be almost always unjust and suffering, should know
virtue and commit crime, should so often deceive and be deceived, and
be the victim or the executioner of his fellows, etc.; if all that be
not a frightful evil, I know not where evil is to be found.

Beasts and men suffer almost without ceasing; men suffer the more
because, not only is the gift of thought often a source of torture,
but this faculty of thinking always makes them fear death, which the
beast cannot foresee. Man is a very miserable being, having but a few
hours of rest, a few moments of satisfaction, and a long series of
days of sorrow in his short life. Everybody admits and says this; and
it is true.

They who have protested that all is well are charlatans. Shaftesbury,
who set the fashion in this, was a most unhappy man. I have seen
Bolingbroke torn with grief and rage; and Pope, whom he induced to
put this miserable joke into verse, was one of the most pitiable men
I have ever known, misshapen in body, unbalanced in temperament,
always ill and a burden to himself, harassed by a hundred enemies
until his last moment. At least let us have happy beings saying that
all is well.

If by all is well it is merely meant that a man’s head is happily
placed above his shoulders, so that his eyes are better situated
beside the root of his nose than behind his ears, we may assent.
All is well in that sense. The laws of physics and mathematics are
very well observed in his structure. A man who saw the beautiful
Anne Boleyn, or the still more beautiful Mary Stuart, in her youth,
would have said that it was well; would he have said it on seeing
them die by the hand of the executioner? Would he have said it on
seeing the grandson of the beautiful Mary Stuart perish in the same
way in the heart of his capital? Would he have said it on seeing the
great-grandson even more miserable, because he lived longer?

Glance over the human race, if it be but from the prescriptions of
Sylla to the Irish massacres.

Behold these battlefields, strewn by imbeciles with the corpses of
other imbeciles, whom they have slain with a substance born of the
experiments of a monk. See these arms, these legs, these bloody
brains, and all these scattered limbs; it is the fruit of a quarrel
between two ignorant ministers, neither of whom would dare to open
his mouth in the presence of Newton, Locke, or Halley; or of some
ridiculous quarrel between two forward women. Enter the neighbouring
hospital, where are gathered those who are not yet dead. Their life
is taken from them by fresh torments, and men make a fortune out of
them, keeping a register of the victims who are dissected alive, at
so much a day, under the pretext of healing them.

See these other men, dressed as comedians, earning a little money
by singing, in a foreign language, a very obscure and insipid song,
to thank the author of nature for this horrible outrage done to
nature; and then tell me calmly that all is well.[71] Say the word,
if you dare, in connection with Alexander VI. and Julius II.; say
it over the ruins of a hundred towns that have been swallowed up by
earthquakes, and amid the twelve millions of Americans who are being
assassinated, in twelve million ways, to punish them for not being
able to understand in Latin a papal bull that the monks have read
to them. Say it to-day, the 24th of August, 1772; a day on which
the pen trembles in my fingers, the two-hundredth anniversary of the
massacre of St. Bartholomew. Pass from these innumerable theatres
of carnage to the equally unnumbered retreats of sorrow that cover
the earth, to that swarm of diseases which slowly devour so many
poor wretches while they yet live; think of that frightful ravage of
nature which poisons the human race in its source, and associates
the most abominable of plagues with the most necessary of pleasures.
See that despised king Henry III., and that mediocre leader the Duke
of Mayenne, struck down with the small-pox while they are waging
civil war; and that insolent descendant of a Florentine merchant,
Gondi, and Retz, the priest, archbishop of Paris, preaching with
sword in hand and body diseased. To complete this true and horrible
picture, fancy yourself amid the floods and volcanoes that have so
often devastated so many parts of the world; amid the leprosy and the
plague that have swept it. And do you who read this recall all that
you have suffered, admit that evil exists, and do not add to so many
miseries and horrors the wild absurdity of denying them.


                                XVII

           ROMANCES INVENTED TO EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

Of a hundred peoples who have sought the cause of physical and moral
evil, the Hindoos are the first whose romantic imaginations are known
to us. They are sublime, if the word “sublime” be taken to mean
“high.” Evil, according to the ancient Brahmans, comes of a quarrel
that once took place in the highest heavens, between the faithful and
the jealous angels. The rebels were cast out of heaven into Ondera
for millions of ages. But the great being pardoned them at the end
of a few thousand years; they were turned into men, and they brought
upon the earth the evil that they had engendered in the empyræan. We
have elsewhere described at length this ancient fable, the source of
all fables.

It was finely imitated by gifted nations, and grossly reproduced by
barbarians. Nothing, indeed, is more spiritual and agreeable than
the story of Pandora and her box. If Hesiod has had the merit of
inventing this allegory, I think it as superior to Homer as Homer is
to Lycophron.

This box of Pandora, containing all the evils that have issued from
it, seems to have all the charm of the most striking and delicate
allusions. Nothing is more enchanting than this origin of our
sufferings. But there is something still more admirable in the story
of Pandora. It has a very high merit, which seems to have escaped
notice: it is that no one was ever commanded to believe it.


                                XVIII

         OF THE SAME ROMANCES, IMITATED BY BARBARIC NATIONS

In the regions of Chaldæa and Syria the barbarians also had their
legends of the origin of evil. Among one of these nations in the
neighbourhood of the Euphrates it was said that a serpent, meeting
a burdened and thirsty ass, asked what the ass carried. “The recipe
of immortality,” said the ass; “God has bestowed it upon man, who
has laid it on my back. He follows me, but is far off, because he
has only two legs. I die of thirst; prithee tell me where there is a
stream.” The serpent led the ass to water, and, while it drank, stole
the recipe. Hence it is that the serpent is immortal, while man is
subject to death and all the pains that precede it.

You will observe that the serpent was thought by all peoples to
be immortal because it cast its skin. If it changed its skin,
this must have been in order to become young again. I have spoken
elsewhere of this naïve theology; but it is well to bring it once
more to the notice of the reader, in order to show him the nature of
this venerable antiquity, in which serpents and asses played such
important parts.

The Syrians rose higher. They told that man and woman, having been
created in heaven, desired one day to eat a certain cake; and that
they then asked an angel to show them the place of retirement. The
angel pointed to the earth. They went thither; and God, to punish
them for their gluttony, left them there. Let us also leave them
there, and their dinner and their ass and their serpent. These
inconceivable puerilities of ancient Syria are not worth a moment’s
notice. The detestable fables of an obscure people should be excluded
from a serious discussion.

Let us return from these miserable legends to the great saying of
Epicurus, which has so long alarmed the whole earth, and to which
there is no answer but a sigh: “Either God wished to prevent evil
and could not do so; or he was able to do so, and did not wish.”

A thousand bachelors and doctors of divinity have fired the arrows of
the school at this unshakeable rock; in this terrible shelter have
the Atheists taken refuge. Yet the Atheist must admit that there is
in nature an active, intelligent, necessary, eternal principle, and
that from this principle comes all that we call good and evil. Let us
discuss the point with the Atheist.


                                 XIX

                 DISCOURSE OF AN ATHEIST ON ALL THIS

An Atheist says to me: It has been proved, I admit, that there is
an eternal and necessary principle. But from the fact that it is
necessary I infer that all that is derived from it is necessary;
you have been compelled to admit this yourself. Since everything is
necessary, evil is as inevitable as good. The great wheel of the
ever-turning machine crushes all that comes in its way. I have no
need of an intelligent being who can do nothing of himself, and who
is as much a slave to his destiny as I am to mine. If he existed,
I should have too much with which to reproach him. I should be
obliged to call him either feeble or wicked. I would rather deny
his existence than be discourteous to him. Let us get through this
miserable life as well as we can, without reference to a fantastic
being whom no one has ever seen, and to whom it would matter little,
if he existed, whether we believed in him or not. What I think of
him can no more affect him, supposing that he exists, than what
he thinks of me, of which I am ignorant, affects me. There is no
relation, no connection, no interest between him and me. Either there
is no such being or he is an utter stranger to me. Let us do as nine
hundred and ninety-nine mortals out of a thousand do; they work,
generate, eat, drink, sleep, suffer, and die, without speaking of
metaphysics, or knowing that there is such a thing.


                                 XX

                      DISCOURSE OF A MANICHÆAN

A Manichæan, hearing the Atheist, says to him: You are mistaken.
Not only is there a God, but there are necessarily two. It has been
fully proved that the universe is arranged intelligently, and there
is an intelligent principle in nature; but it is impossible that this
intelligent principle, which is the author of good, should also be
the author of evil. Evil must have its own God. Zoroaster was the
first to proclaim this great truth, about two thousand years ago;
and two other Zoroasters came afterwards to confirm it. The Parsees
have always followed, and still follow, this excellent doctrine. Some
wretched people or other, called the Jews, at that time in bondage to
us, learned a little of our science, together with the names of Satan
and Knatbul. They recognised God and the devil; and the devil was so
powerful, in the opinion of this poor little people, that one day,
when God had descended into their country, the devil took him up
into a mountain. Admit two gods, therefore; the world is large enough
to hold them and find sufficient work for them.


                                 XXI

                        DISCOURSE OF A PAGAN

Then a Pagan arose, and said: If we are to admit two gods, I do
not see what prevents us from worshipping a thousand. The Greeks
and Romans, who were superior to you, were polytheists. It will be
necessary some day to return to the admirable doctrine that peoples
the universe with genii and deities; it is assuredly the only
system which explains everything--the only one in which there is no
contradiction. If your wife betrays you, Venus is the cause of it.
If you are robbed, put the blame on Mercury. If you lose an arm or
a leg in battle, it was arranged by Mars. So much for the evil. In
regard to the good, not only do Apollo, Ceres, Pomona, Bacchus, and
Flora load you with presents, but occasionally the same Mars will rid
you of your enemies, the same Venus will find you mistresses, the
same Mercury may pour all your neighbours’ gold into your coffers,
provided your hand comes to the assistance of his wand.

It was much easier for these gods to agree in governing the universe
than it seems to be to this Manichæan to reconcile his Ormuzd, the
benevolent, and Ahriman, the malevolent, two mortal enemies, so as
to maintain both light and darkness. Many eyes see better than one.
Hence all the poets of antiquity are continually calling councils
of the gods. How can you suppose that one god is enough to see to
all the details of life on Saturn and all the business of the star
Capella? What! You imagine that everything on our globe, except
in the houses of the King of Prussia and the Pope Ganganelli, is
regulated by councils, and there is no council in heaven! There is no
better way of deciding things than by a majority of votes. The deity
always acts in the wisest way. The Theist seems to me, in comparison
with a Pagan, to be like a Prussian soldier entering the territory
of Venice; he is charmed with the excellence of the government. “The
king of this country,” he says, “must work from morning to night. I
greatly pity him.” “There is no king,” people reply; “we are governed
by a council.”

Here are the true principles of our ancient religion.

The great being known as Jehovah or Yaa among the Phœnicians, the
Jove of other Asiatic nations, the Jupiter of the Romans, the Zeus of
the Greeks, is the sovereign of gods and men.

                   _Deum sator atque hominum rex._

The master of the whole of nature, to whom nothing in the whole range
of being approaches.

                  _Cui nihil simile, nec secundum._

The animating spirit of the universe.

                        _Jovis omnia plena._

All the ideas that one may have of God are enfolded in this fine
verse of the ancient Orpheus, quoted throughout antiquity, and
repeated in all the mysteries.

          εἶς ἔστ’, αὐτογενὴς, ἑνὸς ἔkγονα πάντα τέτέυκται.

          “He is One, self-born, and all was born of One.”

But he confides to the subordinate gods the care of the stars, the
elements, the seas, and the bowels of the earth. His wife, who
represents the expanse of space that he fills, is Juno. His daughter,
who is eternal wisdom, his word, is Minerva. His other daughter,
Venus, is the lover of the poetical generation. She is the mother of
love, inflaming all sensitive beings, uniting them, reproducing by
the attraction of pleasure all that necessity devotes to death. All
the gods have made presents to mortals. Ceres has given them corn,
Bacchus the vine, Pomona fruit; Apollo and Mercury have taught them
the arts.

The great Zeus, the great Demiourgos, had made the planets and the
earth. He had brought men and animals into existence on our planet.
The first man was, according to the account of Berosus, Alora, father
of Sares, grandfather of Alaspara, who begot Amenon, of whom was born
Metalare, who was the father of Daon, father of Everodao, father of
Amphis, father of Osiarte, father of the famous Sixutros or Xixutrus,
King of Chaldæa, under whom occurred the well-known deluge, which the
Greeks called “the deluge of Ogyges”; a flood of which the precise
date is still uncertain, as is that of the other great inundation,
which swallowed up the isle of Atlantis and part of Greece about six
thousand years ago.

We have another theogony in Sanchoniathon, without a deluge. Those of
the Hindoos, Chinese, and Egyptians are very different again.

All events of antiquity are lost in a dark night; but the existence
and blessings of Jupiter are clearer than the light of the sun. The
hero who, stirred by his example, did good to men was known by the
holy name of Dionysos, son of God. Bacchus, Hercules, Perseus, and
Romulus also received this divine name. Some went so far even as to
say that the divine virtue was communicated to their mothers. The
Greeks and Romans, although they were somewhat debauched, as are
to-day all Christians of a sociable nature, rather drunken, like the
canons of Germany, and given to unnatural vices, like the French
king Henry III. and his Nogaret, were very religious. They offered
sacrifice and incense, walked in processions, and fasted.

But everything becomes corrupt in time. Religion changed. The
splendid name of Son of God--that is to say, just and benevolent--was
afterwards given to the most unjust and cruel of men, because they
were powerful. The ancient piety, which was humane, was displaced by
superstition, which is always cruel. Virtue had dwelt on the earth as
long as the fathers of families were the only priests, and offered to
Jupiter and the immortal gods the first of their fruits and flowers;
but all this was changed when the priests began to shed blood and
wanted to share with the gods. They did share in truth; they took the
offerings, and left the smoke to the gods. You know how our enemies
succeeded in crushing us, adopting our earlier morals, rejecting our
bloody sacrifices, calling men to the Church, making a party for
themselves among the poor until such time as they should capture the
rich. They took our place. We are annihilated, they triumph; but,
corrupted at length like ourselves, they need a great reform, which I
wish them with all my heart.


                                XXII

                         DISCOURSE OF A JEW

Take no notice of this idolatrous Pagan who would turn God into
a Dutch president, and offer us subordinate gods like members of
parliament.

My religion, being above nature, can have no resemblance to others.

The first difference between them and us is that the source of our
religion was hidden for a very long time from the rest of the earth.
The dogmas of our fathers were buried, like ourselves, in a little
country about a hundred and fifty miles long and sixty in width. In
this well dwelt the truth that was unknown to the whole world, until
certain rebels, going forth from among us, took from it the name of
“truth” in the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero; and
presently boasted that they were establishing a new truth.

The Chaldæans recognised Alora as their father, as you know.
The Phœnicians descended from a man named Origen, according to
Sanchoniathon. The Greeks had their Prometheus; the Atlantids had
their Ouran, called in Greek Ouranos. I say nothing of the Chinese,
Hindoos, or Scythians. We had our Adam, of whom nobody ever heard
except our nation, and we only very late. It was not the Ephaistos
of the Greeks, known to the Latins as Vulcan, who invented the
art of using metals; it was Tubalcain. The whole of the West was
astonished to hear, under Constantine, that it was not Bacchus to
whom the nations owed the use of wine, but Noah, whose name none
knew in the whole Roman Empire, any more than they knew the names of
his ancestors, which were unknown throughout the earth. The anecdote
was learned only from our Bible, when it was translated into Greek;
it began to spread about that time. The sun was then seen to be no
longer the source of light; the light was created before the sun,
and separated from the darkness, as the waters were separated from
the waters. Woman was made from a rib, which God himself took out
of a sleeping man, without awakening him, and without causing his
descendants to be short of a rib.

The Tigris, Araxis, Euphrates, and Nile all had their source in the
same garden. We do not know where the garden was, but its existence
is proved, because the gate was guarded by a cherub.

Animals speak. The eloquence of a serpent was fatal to the whole
human race. A Chaldæan prophet conversed with his ass.

God, the creator of all men, is not the father of all men, but of
one family alone. This family, always wandering, left the fertile
land of Chaldæa to wander for some time in the neighbourhood of
Sodom; from this journey it acquired an incontestable right to the
city of Jerusalem, which was not yet in existence.

Our family increases at such a rate that seventy men produce, at the
end of two hundred and fifty years, six hundred and thirty thousand
men bearing arms; counting the women, children, and old men, that
amounts to about three millions. These three millions live in a small
canton of Egypt which cannot maintain twenty thousand people. For
their advantage God puts to death in one night all the first-born of
the Egyptians; and, after this massacre, instead of giving Egypt to
his people, God puts himself at their head to fly with them dry-foot
across the sea, and cause a whole generation of Jews to die in the
desert.

We have seven times been in slavery in spite of the appalling
miracles that God works for us every day, causing the moon to stand
still in midday, and also the sun. Ten out of twelve of our tribes
perished for ever. The other two are scattered and in misery. We
have always prophets, nevertheless. God descends continually among
our people alone, and mingles only with us. He appears constantly to
these prophets, his sole confidants and favourites.

He goes to visit Addo or Iddo or Jeddo, and commands him to travel
without eating. The prophet thinks that God has ordered him to eat
that he may walk better; he eats, and forthwith he is eaten by a lion
(1 _Kings_ xiii.).

God commands Isaiah to go forth among his fellow-citizens in a most
unbecoming state of attire, _discoopertis natibus_ (_Isaiah_ xx.).

God orders Jeremiah to put a yoke on his neck and a saddle on his
back (_ch._ xxvii. according to the Hebrews).

He orders Ezekiel to have himself bound, to eat a parchment book, to
lie for two hundred and ninety days on the right side and forty days
on the left side, and then to eat filth with his bread.

He commands Hosea to take a prostitute and have three children
by her; then he commands him to pay an adulterous woman and have
children by her.

Add to all these prodigies an uninterrupted series of massacres, and
you will see that among us all things are divine, because nothing is
in accordance with what men call decent laws.

Unhappily, we were not well known to other nations until we were
nearly annihilated. It was our enemies, the Christians, who made
us known when they despoiled us. They built up their system with
material taken from a bad Greek translation of our Bible. They insult
and oppress us to this day; but our turn will come. It is well known
how we will triumph at the end of the world, when there will be no
one left on the earth.


                                XXIII

                         DISCOURSE OF A TURK

When the Jew had finished, a Turk, who had smoked throughout the
meeting, washed his mouth, recited the formula “Allah Illah,” and
said to me:

I have listened to all these dreamers. I have gathered that thou
art a dog of a Christian, but thou pleasest me because thou seemest
liberal, and art in favour of gratuitous predestination. I believe
thou art a sensible man, assuming that thou dost agree with me.

Most of thy dogs of Christians have spoken only folly about our
Mohammed. A certain Baron de Tott, a man of much ability and
geniality, who did us great service in the last war, induced me
some time ago to read a book of one of your most learned men, named
Grotius, entitled _The Truth of the Christian Religion_. This Grotius
accuses our great Mohammed of forcing men to believe that a pigeon
spoke in his ear, that a camel conversed with him during the night,
and that he had put half the moon in his sleeve. If the most learned
of your Christ-worshippers can write such asinine stuff, what must I
think of the others?

No, Mohammed did none of these village-miracles, of which people
speak only a hundred years after the supposed event. He wrought none
of those miracles which Baron de Tott read to me in the _Golden
Legend_, written at Geneva. He wrought none of your miracles in the
manner of St. Médard, which have been so much derided in Europe, and
at which a French ambassador has laughed so much in our presence.
The miracles of Mohammed were victories. God has shown that he was
a favourite by subjecting half our hemisphere to him. He was not
unknown for two whole centuries. He triumphed as soon as he was
persecuted.

His religion is wise, severe, chaste, and humane. Wise, because
it knows not the folly of giving God associates, and it has no
mysteries; severe, because it prohibits games of chance, and wine,
and strong drinks, and orders prayer five times a day; chaste,
because it reduces to four the prodigious number of spouses who
shared the bed of all oriental princes; humane, because it imposes on
us almsgiving more rigorously than the journey to Mecca.

Add tolerance to all these marks of truth. Reflect that we have in
the city of Stamboul alone more than a hundred thousand Christians of
all sects, who carry out all the ceremonies of their cults in peace,
and live so happily under the shelter of our laws that they never
deign to visit you, while you crowd to our imperial gate.


                                XXIV

                        DISCOURSE OF A THEIST

A Theist then asked permission to speak, and said:

Everyone has his own opinion, good or bad. I should be sorry to
distress any good man. First, I ask pardon of the Atheist; but it
seems to me that, compelled as he is to admit an excellent design in
the order of the universe, he is bound to admit an intelligence that
has conceived and carried out this design. It is enough, it seems to
me, that, when the Atheist lights a candle, he admits that it is for
the purpose of giving light. It seems to me that he should also grant
that the sun was made to illumine our part of the universe. We must
not dispute about such probable matters.

The Atheist should yield the more graciously since, being a good man,
he has nothing to fear from a master who has no interest in injuring
him. He may quite safely admit a God; he will not pay a penny the
more in taxes, and will not live less comfortably.

As to you, my pagan friend, I submit that you are rather late with
your project of restoring polytheism. For that Maxentius ought to
have defeated Constantine, or else Julian ought to have lived thirty
years longer.

I confess that I see no impossibility in the existence of several
beings far superior to us, each of whom would superintend some
heavenly body. Indeed, it would give me some pleasure to prefer
your Naiads, Dryads, Sylvans, Graces, and Loves to St. Fiacre, St.
Pancratius, Sts. Crepin and Crepinien, St. Vitus, St. Cunegonde, or
St. Marjolaine. But, really, one must not multiply things without
need; and as a single intelligence suffices for the regulation of the
world, I will stop at that until other powers show me that they share
its rule.

As to you, my Manichæan friend, you seem to me a duellist, very fond
of fighting. I am a peaceful man, and do not like to find myself
between two rivals who are ever at war. Your Ormuzd is enough for me;
you can keep your Ahriman.

I shall always be somewhat embarrassed in regard to the origin of
evil; but I suppose that the good Ormuzd, who made everything, could
not do better. I cannot offend him if I say to him: You have done all
that a powerful, wise, and good being could do. It is not your fault
if your works cannot be as good and perfect as yourself. Imperfection
is one of the essential differences between you and your creatures.
You could not make gods; it was necessary that, since men possessed
reason, they should display folly, just as there must be friction in
every machine. Each man has his dose of imperfection and folly, from
the very fact that you are perfect and wise. He must not be always
happy, because you are always happy. It seems to me that a collection
of muscles, nerves, and veins cannot last more than eighty or a
hundred years at the most, and that you must be for ever. It seems to
me impossible that an animal, necessarily compacted of desires and
wills, should not at times wish to serve his own purpose by doing
evil to his neighbour. You only never do evil. Lastly, there is
necessarily so great a distance between you and your works that the
good is in you, and the evil must be in them.[72]

As for me, imperfect as I am, I thank you for giving me a short span
of existence, and especially for not having made me a professor of
theology.

That is not at all a bad compliment. God could not be angry with me,
seeing that I do not wish to displease him. In fine, I feel that,
if I do no evil to my brethren and respect my master, I shall have
nothing to fear, either from Ahriman, or Cerberus and the Furies, or
Satan, or Knatbull, or St. Fiacre and St. Crepin; and I shall end my
days in peace and the pursuit of philosophy.

I come now to you, Mr. Abrabanel and Mr. Benjamin.[73] You seem
to me to be the maddest of the lot. The Kaffirs, Hottentots, and
blacks of New Guinea are more reasonable and decent beings than your
Jewish ancestors were. You have surpassed all nations in exorbitant
legends, bad conduct, and barbarism. You are paying for it; it is
your destiny. The Roman Empire has fallen; the Parsees, your former
masters, are scattered. The Armenians sell rags, and occupy a low
position in the whole of Asia. There is no trace left of the ancient
Egyptians. Why should you be a power?

As to you, my Turkish friend, I advise you to come to terms as soon
as possible with the Empress of Russia, if you wish to keep what you
have usurped in Europe. I am willing to believe that the victories of
Mohammed, son of Abdala, were miracles; but Catherine II. also works
miracles. Take care that she do not some day perform the miracle of
sending you back to the deserts from which you came. In particular,
continue to be tolerant; it is the true way to please the being of
beings, who is alike the father of Turks and Russians, Chinese and
Japanese, black and yellow man, and of the whole of nature.


                                 XXV

                       DISCOURSE OF A CITIZEN

When the Theist had spoken, a man arose and said: I am a citizen,
and therefore the friend of all these gentlemen. I will not dispute
with any of them. I wish only to see them all united in the design of
aiding and loving each other, in making each other happy, in so far
as men of such different opinions can love each other, and contribute
to each other’s happiness, which is as difficult as it is necessary.

To attain this end, I advise them first to cast in the fire all the
controversial books which come their way, especially those of the
Jesuits; and also the ecclesiastical gazette, and all other pamphlets
which are but the fuel of the civil war of fools.

Next, each of our brethren, whether Theist, Turk, Pagan, Greek
Christian, Latin Christian, Anglican, Scandinavian, Jew, or Atheist,
will read attentively several pages of Cicero’s _De Officiis_, or of
Montaigne, and some of La Fontaine’s _Fables_.

The reading of these works insensibly disposes men to that concord
which theologians have hitherto held in horror. Their minds being
thus prepared, every time that a Christian and a Mussulman meet an
Atheist they will say to him: “Dear brother, may heaven enlighten
you”; and the Atheist will reply: “When I am converted I shall come
and thank you.”

The Theist will give two kisses to the Manichæan woman in honour of
the two principles. The Greek and Roman woman will give three to
each member of the other sects, even the Quakers and Jansenists. The
Socinians need only embrace once, seeing that those gentlemen believe
there is only one person in God; but this embrace will be equal to
three when it is performed in good faith.

We know that an Atheist can live very cordially with a Jew,
especially if the Jew does not charge more than eight per cent.
in lending him money; but we have no hope of ever seeing a lively
friendship between a Calvinist and a Lutheran. All that we require
of the Calvinist is that he return the salute of the Lutheran with
some affection, and do not follow the example of the Quakers, who do
reverence to nobody; but the Calvinists have not their candour.

We urge the primitive folk called Quakers to marry their sons to the
daughters of the Theists who are known as Socinians, as these young
ladies, being nearly all the daughters of priests, are very poor.
Not only will it be a very good deed before God and men, but these
marriages will produce a new race, which, representing the first
years of the Christian Church, will be very useful to the human race.

These preliminaries being settled, if any quarrel occur between
members of two different sects, they must never choose a theologian
as arbitrator, for he would infallibly eat the oyster and leave them
the shells.

To maintain the established peace nothing shall be offered for sale,
either by a Greek to a Turk, a Turk to a Jew, or a Roman to a Roman,
except what pertains to food, clothing, lodging, or pleasure. They
shall not sell circumcision, or baptism, or burial, or permission to
turn round the black stone in the _caaba_, or to harden one’s knees
before Our Lady of Loretto, who is still blacker.

In all the disputes that shall arise it is expressly forbidden to
treat any person as a dog, however angry one may be--unless indeed we
treat dogs as men when they steal our dinner or bite us.




                    POEM ON THE LISBON DISASTER;

            OR AN EXAMINATION OF THE AXIOM, “ALL IS WELL”


      Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
      Affrighted gathering of human kind!
      Eternal lingering of useless pain!
      Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
      And contemplate this ruin of a world.
      Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
      This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
      These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts--
      A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
      Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
      Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
      In racking torment end their stricken lives.
      To those expiring murmurs of distress,
      To that appalling spectacle of woe,
      Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
      The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
      Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
      “God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
      What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
      That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
      Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
      Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
      In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
      Tranquil spectators of your brothers’ wreck,
      Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,
      Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,
      Let them but lash your own security;
      Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.
      When earth its horrid jaws half open shows,
      My plaint is innocent, my cries are just.
      Surrounded by such cruelties of fate,
      By rage of evil and by snares of death,
      Fronting the fierceness of the elements,
      Sharing our ills, indulge me my lament.
      “’Tis pride,” ye say--“the pride of rebel heart,
      To think we might fare better than we do.”
      Go, tell it to the Tagus’ stricken banks;
      Search in the ruins of that bloody shock;
      Ask of the dying in that house of grief,
      Whether ’tis pride that calls on heaven for help
      And pity for the sufferings of men.
      “All’s well,” ye say, “and all is necessary.”
      Think ye this universe had been the worse
      Without this hellish gulf in Portugal?
      Are ye so sure the great eternal cause,
      That knows all things, and for itself creates,
      Could not have placed us in this dreary clime
      Without volcanoes seething ’neath our feet?
      Set you this limit to the power supreme?
      Would you forbid it use its clemency?
      Are not the means of the great artisan
      Unlimited for shaping his designs?
      The master I would not offend, yet wish
      This gulf of fire and sulphur had outpoured
      Its baleful flood amid the desert wastes.
      God I respect, yet love the universe.
      Not pride, alas, it is, but love of man,
      To mourn so terrible a stroke as this.

      Would it console the sad inhabitants
      Of these aflame and desolated shores
      To say to them: “Lay down your lives in peace;
      For the world’s good your homes are sacrificed;
      Your ruined palaces shall others build,
      For other peoples shall your walls arise;
      The North grows rich on your unhappy loss;
      Your ills are but a link in general law;
      To God you are as those low creeping worms
      That wait for you in your predestined tombs”?
      What speech to hold to victims of such ruth!
      Add not such cruel outrage to their pain.

      Nay, press not on my agitated heart
      These iron and irrevocable laws,
      This rigid chain of bodies, minds, and worlds.
      Dreams of the bloodless thinker are such thoughts.
      God holds the chain: is not himself enchained;
      By his indulgent choice is all arranged;
      Implacable he’s not, but free and just.
      Why suffer we, then, under one so just?[74]
      There is the knot your thinkers should undo.
      Think ye to cure our ills denying them?
      All peoples, trembling at the hand of God,
      Have sought the source of evil in the world.
      When the eternal law that all things moves
      Doth hurl the rock by impact of the winds,
      With lightning rends and fires the sturdy oak,
      They have no feeling of the crashing blows;
      But I, I live and feel, my wounded heart
      Appeals for aid to him who fashioned it.

      Children of that Almighty Power, we stretch
      Our hands in grief towards our common sire.
      The vessel, truly, is not heard to say:
      “Why should I be so vile, so coarse, so frail?”
      Nor speech nor thought is given unto it.
      The urn that, from the potter’s forming hand,
      Slips and is shattered has no living heart
      That yearns for bliss and shrinks from misery.
      “This misery,” ye say, “is others’ good.”
      Yes; from my mouldering body shall be born
      A thousand worms, when death has closed my pain.
      Fine consolation this in my distress!
      Grim speculators on the woes of men,
      Ye double, not assuage, my misery.
      In you I mark the nerveless boast of pride
      That hides its ill with pretext of content.

      I am a puny part of the great whole.
      Yes; but all animals condemned to live,
      All sentient things, born by the same stern law,
      Suffer like me, and like me also die.

      The vulture fastens on his timid prey,
      And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs:
      All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
      An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
      The eagle is transfixed by shaft of man;
      The man, prone in the dust of battlefield,
      Mingling his blood with dying fellow-men,
      Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds.
      Thus the whole world in every member groans:
      All born for torment and for mutual death.
      And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say
      The ills of each make up the good of all!
      What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice,
      Mortal and pitiful, ye cry, “All’s well,”
      The universe belies you, and your heart
      Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit.

      All dead and living things are locked in strife.
      Confess it freely--evil stalks the land,
      Its secret principle unknown to us.
      Can it be from the author of all good?
      Are we condemned to weep by tyrant law
      Of black Typhon or barbarous Ahriman?[75]
      These odious monsters, whom a trembling world
      Made gods, my spirit utterly rejects.

      But how conceive a God supremely good,
      Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
      Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
      What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
      From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
      And came it from no other, for he’s lord:
      Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!
      O wondrous mingling of diversities!
      A God came down to lift our stricken race:
      He visited the earth, and changed it not!
      One sophist says he had not power to change;
      “He had,” another cries, “but willed it not:
      In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate,
      The hidden thunders, belched from underground,
      Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns
      Across the smiling face of Portugal.
      God either smites the inborn guilt of man,
      Or, arbitrary lord of space and time,
      Devoid alike of pity and of wrath,
      Pursues the cold designs he has conceived.
      Or else this formless stuff, recalcitrant,
      Bears in itself inalienable faults;
      Or else God tries us, and this mortal life
      Is but the passage to eternal spheres.
      ’Tis transitory pain we suffer here,
      And death its merciful deliverance.
      Yet, when this dreadful passage has been made,
      Who will contend he has deserved the crown?
      Whatever side we take we needs must groan;
      We nothing know, and everything must fear.
      Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it;
      The human race demands a word of God.
      ’Tis his alone to illustrate his work,
      Console the weary, and illume the wise.
      Without him man, to doubt and error doomed,
      Finds not a reed that he may lean upon.
      From Leibnitz learn we not by what unseen
      Bonds, in this best of all imagined worlds,
      Endless disorder, chaos of distress,
      Must mix our little pleasures thus with pain;
      Nor why the guiltless suffer all this woe
      In common with the most abhorrent guilt.
      ’Tis mockery to tell me all is well.
      Like learned doctors, nothing do I know.
      Plato has said that men did once have wings
      And bodies proof against all mortal ill;
      That pain and death were strangers to their world.
      How have we fallen from that high estate!
      Man crawls and dies: all is but born to die:
      The world’s the empire of destructiveness.
      This frail construction of quick nerves and bones
      Cannot sustain the shock of elements;
      This temporary blend of blood and dust
      Was put together only to dissolve;
      This prompt and vivid sentiment of nerve
      Was made for pain, the minister of death:
      Thus in my ear does nature’s message run.
      Plato and Epicurus I reject,
      And turn more hopefully to learned Bayle.
      With even poised scale Bayle bids me doubt.
      He, wise and great enough to need no creed,
      Has slain all systems--combats even himself:
      Like that blind conqueror of Philistines,
      He sinks beneath the ruin he has wrought.[76]
      What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
      Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
      Man is a stranger to his own research;
      He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
      Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
      Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
      But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
      Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
      Our being mingles with the infinite;
      Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
      This world, this theatre of pride and wrong,
      Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness.
      With plaints and groans they follow up the quest,
      To die reluctant, or be born again.
      At fitful moments in our pain-racked life
      The hand of pleasure wipes away our tears;
      But pleasure passes like a fleeting shade,
      And leaves a legacy of pain and loss.
      The past for us is but a fond regret,
      The present grim, unless the future’s clear.
      If thought must end in darkness of the tomb,
      All will be well one day--so runs our hope.
      All _now_ is well, is but an idle dream.
      The wise deceive me: God alone is right.
      With lowly sighing, subject in my pain,
      I do not fling myself ’gainst Providence.
      Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone,
      The sunny ways of pleasure’s genial rule;
      The times have changed, and, taught by growing age,
      And sharing of the frailty of mankind,
      Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom,
      I can but suffer, and will not repine.

      A caliph once, when his last hour had come,
      This prayer addressed to him he reverenced:
      “To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear
      What thou dost lack in thy immensity--
      Evil and ignorance, distress and sin.”
      He might have added one thing further--hope.




                             FOOTNOTES:

[1] Probably adopting a name which is known to have existed among his
mother’s ancestors. But it is curious that “Voltaire” is an anagram
of his name--Arouet l (e) j (eune)--if u be read as v and j as i.

[2] The condition of Toulouse will be best understood from a
description of these processions which Voltaire gives elsewhere.
In front walked the shoemakers, bearing the authentic head of a
prince of Peloponnesus, who had been Bishop of Toulouse _during the
lifetime_ of Christ. After them came the slaters, carrying the bones
of the fourteen thousand children slain by Herod; the old-clothes
dealers, with a piece of the dress of the Virgin Mary; and the
tailors, with the relics of St. Peter and St. Paul.--J. M.

[3] I know only two instances in history of fathers being charged
with killing their children on account of religion. The first is the
case of the father of St. Barbara, or Ste. Barbe. He had had two
windows made in his bath-room. Barbara, in his absence, had a third
made, to honour the Holy Trinity. She made the sign of the cross on
the marble columns _with the tip of her finger_, and it was deeply
engraved on the stone. Her son came angrily upon her, sword in hand;
but she escaped through a mountain, which opened to receive her. The
father went round the mountain and caught her. She was stripped and
flogged, but God clothed her in a white cloud. In the end her father
cut off her head. So says the _Flower of the Saints_.

The second case is that of Prince Hermenegild. He rebelled against
his father, the king, gave him battle (in 584), and was beaten and
killed by an officer. As his father was an Arian, he was regarded as
a martyr.

[4] Voltaire nobly conceals his work. It was he who, from his exile
near Geneva, sent for young Calas, made searching inquiries in
Toulouse, and instructed the Parisian lawyers to appeal. He enlisted
the interest of English and French visitors at Geneva, and there
was “a rivalry in generosity between the two nations.” After a long
struggle with the Toulouse authorities the sentence was reversed at
Paris amid general enthusiasm. The King very generously pensioned the
widow and the other victims.--J. M.

[5] Thanks to Voltaire and to the progress of Rationalism at Paris,
she was received with the greatest enthusiasm and generosity.--J. M.

[6] In ancient Rome the _devoti_ were those who devoted themselves to
the good of the Republic.

[7] The Catholic Church did not discover the infallibility of the
Pope until 1870, since which date his lips have remained, officially,
closed.--J. M.

[8] A thrust at the Jesuits.--J. M.

[9] The Catholic League for the suppression of Protestantism in
France, in the second half of the sixteenth century, led to much war
and bloodshed.--J. M.

[10] In his treatise _Dieu et les Hommes_ Voltaire, after a very
incomplete survey of history, puts the number of victims of religious
wars and quarrels at 9,468,800.--J. M.

[11] To marry within certain degrees of kindred, etc.--J. M.

[12] An exaggerated account of the Ulster rebellion.--J. M.

[13] This position could be held in a modified form in regard
to ancient Greece. See E. S. P. Haynes’s work, _Religious
Persecution_.--J. M.

[14] The Jews had no right to inflict death after Judæa had become
a Roman province, but the authorities at times overlooked these
punishments of blasphemy.

[15] Ch. 25. Voltaire has in this followed ecclesiastical custom.
The word in Suetonius is not “Christo,” but “Chresto,” and therefore
the passage reads, in English: “Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome
for their constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.” As
Chrestus was not an uncommon name at Rome, there is no need to apply
the passage to Christ in any way.--J. M.

[16] The passage of Tacitus (_Annals_, xv., 44) is very generally
rejected as an interpolation.--J. M.

[17] I omit many of the lengthy notes, in which Voltaire, with
veiled irony and a bland pretence of orthodoxy--for the reason of
which see the Introduction,--throws doubt on the persecutions. The
freer scholarship of the nineteenth century has so far justified his
scepticism that few are now interested in the fairy tales of the
early “persecutions.” There was only one general repression of the
Christians, under Diocletian. See the latest editions of Gibbon, and
Robertson’s _Short History of Christianity_ (pp. 130-140).--J. M.

[18] Voltaire’s irony and pretence of orthodoxy must again, as in
so many places, be taken into account. You do not, as a French
commentator says, incur death in French law for throwing a piece of
wood into the Rhone.--J. M.

[19] A beautiful youth loved by the Emperor Hadrian.--J. M.

[20] If they had been content to preach and write, they would
probably have been left in peace; but the refusal to take the oaths,
in a constitution in which much use was made of oaths, exposed them
to suspicion. The refusal to take part publicly in the feasts in
honour of the emperors was a sort of crime at a time when the empire
was constantly stirred by revolutions. The insults they offered to
the established cult were punished with severity and barbarism, and
it was an age of rough and violent ways.

[21] _The Deaths of the Persecutors_, ch. iii.--a very untrustworthy
work. It is doubtful if Lactantius wrote it. There was no general
persecution under Domitian, but certain high officials suffered, like
the rest of Rome, from his excessive suspicion.--J. M.

[22] Voltaire, who knew only the late history of Egypt, gives a
lengthy note to explain his disdain. Archæological research has
altered all that.--J. M.

[23] Not wholly unknown. We know that the mother of Galerius, an
ignorant peasant, was stung by the insults of Christian officers in
the palace, and inflamed her son, who persuaded Diocletian to take
action. The action was mild at first; but Christians tore down the
imperial edict, and the palace was twice set on fire. Then Diocletian
yielded.--J. M.

[24] The persecution under Diocletian began in 303.--J. M.

[25] The Jesuit Busenbaum, edited by the Jesuit La Croix, says
that “it is lawful to kill a prince excommunicated by the Pope,
in whatever country he may be found, because the universe belongs
to the Pope, and he who accepts this commission does a charitable
deed.” This proposition, drawn up in the antechambers of hell, has
done more than anything to raise France against the Jesuits. [They
were expelled from France in 1767.--J. M.]. They endeavoured to
justify themselves by pointing out that the same conclusions are
found in St. Thomas and other Dominicans. As a matter of fact, St.
Thomas of Aquin, the “angelic doctor” and “interpreter of the divine
will”--such are his titles,--says that an apostate prince loses his
right to the crown, and should no longer be obeyed (Bk. II., Part
II., quest. xii.); that the Church may punish him with death; that
the Emperor Julian was tolerated only because the Christians were
weak (same passage); that it is right to kill any heretic (same
place, questions xi. and xii.); that those are laudable who free a
people from a tyrannical prince, etc. We must admit that Gerson,
Chancellor of the University, went farther than St. Thomas, and the
Franciscan Jean Petit much farther than Gerson.

[26] It was not defined by the Church until 1854.--J. M.

[27] This section is somewhat abridged, as much of it is better
developed in preceding works.--J. M.

[28] Voltaire’s eagerness to show the tolerance of the Jews is
purely paradoxical and ironical. His sole object in this section is
to expose the crudities of the Old Testament, under the cloak of
orthodox theological reasoning. Hence he omits the savage laws of
_Deuteronomy_ against foreign cults.--J. M.

[29] It may be useful to recall that, as earlier pages show,
Voltaire did not believe in the “next world.” Much of the phrasing
of this part is, when it is not ironical, merely an _argumentum ad
hominem_.--J. M.

[30] See that excellent work, _The Manual of the Inquisition_.

[31] This horrible doctrine must not wholly be relegated to the
eighteenth century and the Middle Ages. It is still solemn Catholic
doctrine, defined by the Vatican Council in 1870, that no atheist or
agnostic, whether in good or bad faith, can be saved.--J. M.

[32] Daughter of the Emperor Diocletian. Not executed by
Christians.--J. M.

[33] The homily is supposed to have been delivered in London.--J. M.

[34] Greece threw off the Turkish yoke in 1827.--J. M.

[35] In the Greek, Latin, and modern Bibles it is “firmament.” In
the Hebrew text it is “expanse,” though other passages show that it
refers to the solid vault or firmament of the Babylonians.--J. M.

[36] The Rev. Professor Sayce regards _Job_ as a piece of north
Arabian or Edomite literature, borrowed by the Jews.--J. M.

[37] Ninety years old (_Genesis_ xvii., 17).--J. M.

[38] A shaft at the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.--J. M.

[39] See the _Acts of St. Thecla_, written in the first century by a
disciple of St. Paul, and recognised as authentic by Tertullian, St.
Cyprian, St. Gregory of Nazianzum, St. Ambrose, etc.

[40] Spurious _Acts of the Apostle_ xxi.

[41] 1 _Corinthians_ ix., 4, 5, and 7.

[42] _Thessalonians_ iv., 16 and 17.

[43] _Acts_ xxi.

[44] Matthew gives five thousand men and five loaves in chapter xiv.,
and four thousand men and five loaves in chapter xv. Apparently, they
are two different miracles, which makes in all nine thousand men and
at least nine thousand women. If you add nine thousand children, the
total number of diners amounts to twenty-seven thousand--which is
considerable.

[45] A pun of which the point is lost in English. The French phrase,
to make a man “swallow the gudgeon,” means to “gull” a man. Voltaire
turns the “two little fishes” of the gospel into gudgeons to
accommodate his joke.--J. M.

[46] In France, an abbey of which the “abbot” was a kind of absentee
landlord. He lived at Paris, with the title and revenue, and left the
work to a sub-abbot.--J. M.

[47] The indictment is too severe. The later years of Constantine
were marked by silly extravagance, but not debauch. The execution
of his father-in-law was justified. His (partial) acceptance of
Christianity was earlier than Voltaire supposes, and there is no
serious ground for suggesting large payments of money. But it is now
beyond question that he put his brother-in-law (Licinius) to death
treacherously, had his wife, son, and nephew murdered, and greatly
degenerated in later life.--J. M.

[48] No; in the Senate.--J. M.

[49] _Matthew_ xx., 23.

[50] _Matthew_ xx., 26 and 27.

[51] All Christians believe that Jesus was born in a stable, between
an ox and an ass. There is, however, no mention of this in the
gospels. It was imagined by Justin, and is mentioned by Lactantius,
or at least the author of a bad Latin poem on the passions, which is
attributed to Lactantius.

[52]

  A time by fate appointed was to come,
  When sea, and earth, and all the realm of heaven
  Should flame, and ruin seize the world’s great mass.

  J. M.


[53] See _Revelation_, Justin, and Tertullian.

[54] In Voltaire’s time, naturally, the relative priority of Indian,
Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian civilisations was quite unknown,
and his idea of their relations to each other cannot hold to-day.--J.
M.

[55] The famous “Dies iræ,” sung in Catholic funeral services to-day
in England.--J. M.

[56] Justin and Tertullian.

[57] _Apostolic Constitutions_, Bk. II., ch. lvii.

[58] _Apostolic Constitutions_, VIII., vi.

[59] See the _History of the Church of Constantinople and
Alexandria_, in the Bodleian Library.

[60] _Recognitions_ of St. Clement, Bk. IX., Nos. 32-35.

[61] The pun is lost to readers of the English Bible. In French, as
in Syro-Chaldaic and Greek and (approximately) Latin, “Peter” and
“rock” are the same word. We have it in “salt-petre.”--J. M.

[62] More than a million species, on modern estimates.--J. M.

[63] As is well known, the word “virgin” is a wilful mistranslation
of the text of _Isaiah_. “Girl” is the correct translation.--J. M.

[64] The _kerubim_ (or “cherubim”) of the Old Testament are the
winged bulls of the ancient Babylonians, of which there are two fine
specimens in the British Museum.--J. M.

[65] Had Voltaire known what the modern archæologist has discovered,
he would have added that the age of iron did not even dawn until some
centuries after this supposed episode; and iron was not used in the
East until about six centuries afterwards.--J. M.

[66] The number recognised in the Church of Rome.--J. M.

[67] The author was thinking, apparently, of Pope Alexander VI. [Note
by Voltaire.]

[68] The tortures of the Inquisition.--J. M.

[69] Since the words “it” and “he” are both expressed by the French
word “il,” it is not clear whether Voltaire would have spoken of his
supreme being as “it” or “he.” I interpret his feeling as carefully
as the context permits.--J. M.

[70] Leibnitz taught that material things never acted on each other;
the only cause was God. The leaf fell from the tree, when the wind
blew, because God had pre-established that coincidence, or harmony,
of movements.--J. M.

[71] The allusion is to priests, in their coloured vestments, singing
masses for a successful war.--J. M.

[72] Voltaire always candidly faces the problem of evil, and admits
that it is inconsistent with infinite power and goodness. In another
treatise he makes the bold observation that, since morality is merely
a social law regulating the relations of men, it has no application
to his isolated “great being.”--J. M.

[73] Well-known Jews in mediæval history.--J. M.

[74] “Sub Deo justo nemo miser nisi mereatur [Under a just God no one
is miserable who has not deserved misery.]”--_St. Augustine._

[75] The Egyptian and Persian principles of evil. The problem is
discussed in the preceding essay.--J. M.

[76] In a lengthy note Voltaire explains that Bayle never questioned
Providence, and that the scepticism in which he follows Bayle is in
regard to the source of evil. It will be seen from earlier pages,
however, that Voltaire does not ascribe infinite power to his God.
The words “all-perfect” and “almighty,” which occur in this poem, are
poetic phrases.--J. M.




                         Transcriber’s Notes

  Minor punctuation and spelling errors have been silently corrected
  and, except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the
  text, especially in dialogue, and inconsistent or archaic usage,
  have been retained.

  Page 107: “Ah, my brethren, the Holy Sprit” changed to “Ah, my
  brethren, the Holy Spirit”.

  Page 115: “those who scruple to commnicate with foreign religions”
  changed to “those who scruple to communicate with foreign religions”.

  Page 136: “patriach of the west” changed to “patriarch of the west”.



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