iged to seek, desire, and love what is, or what he
thinks is, conducive to his happiness? Is he not forced to fear and avoid
what he judges disagreeable or fatal? Kindle his passions for useful
objects; connect his welfare with those objects; divert him, by sensible
and known motives, from what may injure either him or others, and you will
make him a reasonable and virtuous being. A man without passions would be
equally indifferent to vice and to virtue.

Holy Doctors! you are always repeating to us that the nature of man is
perverted; you exclaim, "that _all flesh has corrupted its way_, that
all the propensities of nature have become inordinate." In this case, you
accuse your God; who was either unable, or unwilling, that this nature
should preserve its primitive perfection. If this nature is corrupted, why
has not God repaired it? The Christian immediately assures me, "that human
nature is repaired; that the death of his God has restored its integrity."
How then, I would ask, do you pretend that human nature, notwithstanding
the death of a God, is still depraved? Is then the death of your God
wholly fruitless? What becomes of his omnipotence and of his victory over
the Devil, if it is true that the Devil still preserves the empire, which,
according to you, he has always exercised in the world?

According to Christian theology, Death is the _wages of sin_. This opinion
is conformable to that of some negro and savage nations, who imagine that
the Death of a man is always the supernatural effect of the anger of the
Gods. Christians firmly believe, that Christ has delivered them from sin;
though they see, that, in their Religion, as in others, man is subject to
Death. To say that Jesus Christ has delivered us from sin, is it not to
say, that a judge has pardoned a criminal, while we see that he leaves him
for execution?

164.

If shutting our eyes upon whatever passes in the world, we would credit
the partisans of the Christian Religion, we should believe, that the
coming of their divine Saviour produced the most wonderful and complete
reform in the morals of nations.

If we examine the Morals of Christian nations, and listen to the clamours
of their priests, we shall be forced to conclude, that Jesus Christ, their
God, preached and died, in vain; his omnipotent will still finds in men,
a resistance, over which he cannot, or will not triumph. The Morality
of this divine Teacher, which his disciples so much admi