, than the uncertainty arising from the opinion of a God,
who, master of his grace, grants it to none but his favourites, and
permits all others to become worthy of eternal torment. Nothing but
enthusiasm or folly can induce a man to prefer improbable conjectures,
attended with uncertainty and insupportable fears.

109.

All religious principles are the work of pure imagination, in which
experience and reason have no share. It is extremely difficult to combat
them, because the imagination, once prepossessed by chimeras, which
astonish or disturb it, is incapable of reasoning. To combat religion and
its phantoms with the arms of reason, is like using a sword to kill gnats;
as soon as the blow is struck, the gnats and chimeras come hovering round
again, and resume in the mind the place, from which they were thought to
have been for ever banished.

When we reject, as too weak, the proofs given of the existence of a God,
they instantly oppose to the arguments, which destroy that existence,
an _inward sense_, a deep persuasion, an invincible inclination, born in
every man, which holds up to his mind, in spite of himself, the idea of an
almighty being, whom he cannot entirely expel from his mind, and whom he
is compelled to acknowledge, in spite of the strongest reasons that can
be urged. But whoever will analyse this _inward sense_, upon which such
stress is laid, will perceive, that it is only the effect of a rooted
habit, which, shutting their eyes against the most demonstrative proofs,
subjects the greater part of men, and often even the most enlightened, to
the prejudices of childhood. What avails this inward sense, or this deep
persuasion, against the evidence, which demonstrates, that _whatever
implies a contradiction cannot exist_?

We are gravely assured, that the non-existence of God is not demonstrated.
Yet, by all that men have hitherto said of him, nothing is better
demonstrated, than that this God is a chimera, whose existence is totally
impossible; since nothing is more evident, than that a being cannot
possess qualities so unlike, so contradictory, so irreconcilable, as
those, which every religion upon earth attributes to the Divinity. Is not
the theologian's God, as well as that of the deist, a cause incompatible
with the effects attributed to it? Let them do what they will, it is
necessary either to invent another God, or to grant, that he, who, for so
many ages, has been held up to the terror of mo