iscern, in this hideous character, the
God, on whom you lavish your incense? Are not the descriptions given
you of the divinity, visibly borrowed from the implacable, jealous,
revengeful, sanguinary, capricious inconsiderate humour of man, who has
not cultivated his reason? O men! You adore only a great savage, whom
you regard, however, as a model to imitate, as an amiable master, as a
sovereign full of perfection.

Religious opinions are ancient monuments of ignorance, credulity,
cowardice, and barbarism of their ancestors. Every savage is a child
fond of the marvellous, who believes every thing, and examines nothing.
Ignorant of nature, he attributes to spirits, enchantments, and to
magic, whatever appears to him extraordinary. His priests appear to him
sorcerers, in whom he supposes a power purely divine, before whom his
confounded reason humbles itself, whose oracles are to him infallible
decrees which it would be dangerous to contradict.

In religion, men have, for the most part, remained in their primitive
barbarity. Modern religions are only ancient follies revived, or presented
under some new form. If the savages of antiquity adored mountains, rivers,
serpents, trees, and idols of every kind; if the EGYPTIANS paid homage to
crocodiles, rats, and onions, do we not see nations, who think themselves
wiser than they, worship bread, into which they imagine, that through
the enchantments of their priests, the divinity has descended. Is not the
Bread-God the idol of many Christian nations, who, in this respect, are as
irrational, as the most savage?

121.

The ferocity, stupidity, and folly of uncivilized man have ever disclosed
themselves in religious practices, either cruel or extravagant. A spirit
of barbarity still survives, and penetrates the religions even of the
most polished nations. Do we not still see human victims offered to
the divinity? To appease the anger of a God, who is always supposed as
ferocious, jealous and vindictive, as a savage, do not those, whose manner
of thinking is supposed to displease him, expire under studied torments,
by the command of sanguinary laws? Modern nations, at the instigation of
their priests, have perhaps improved upon the atrocious folly of barbarous
nations; at least, we find, that it has ever entered the heads of savages
to torment for opinions, to search the thoughts, to molest men for the
invisible movements of their brains?

When we see learned nations, such