y authority, inculcated by education, and maintained by
example, they pass from age to age, and strengthen their empire from
habit and inattention. But if man, enlightened by reflection and
experience, brings to mature examination the prejudices of his
childhood, he soon discovers a multitude of incongruities and
contradictions which awaken his sagacity and excite his reasoning
powers.

"At first, remarking the diversity and opposition of the creeds which
divide the nations, he takes courage to question the infallibility
which each of them claims, and arming himself with their reciprocal
pretensions, he conceives that his senses and his reason, derived
immediately from God, are a law not less holy, a guide not less sure,
than the mediate and contradictory codes of the prophets.

"If he then examines the texture of these codes themselves, he observes
that their laws, pretended to be divine, that is, immutable and eternal,
have arisen from circumstances of times, places, and persons; that
they have issued one from the other, in a kind of genealogical order,
borrowing from each other reciprocally a common and similar fund of
ideas, which every lawgiver modifies according to his fancy.

"If he ascends to the source of these ideas, he finds it involved in
the night of time, in the infancy of nations, even to the origin of the
world, to which they claim alliance; and there, placed in the darkness
of chaos, in the empire of fables and traditions, they present
themselves, accompanied with a state of things so full of prodigies,
that it seems to forbid all access to the judgment: but this state
itself excites a first effort of reason, which resolves the difficulty;
for if the prodigies, found in the theological systems, have really
existed--if, for instance, the metamorphoses, the apparitions, the
conversations with one or many gods, recorded in the books of the
Indians, the Hebrews, the Parses, are historical events, he must agree
that nature in those times was totally different from what it is at
present; that the present race of men are quite another species from
those who then existed; and, therefore, he ought not to trouble his head
about them.

"If, on the contrary, these miraculous events have really not existed
in the physical order of things, then he readily conceives that they are
creatures of the human intellect; and this faculty being still capable
of the most fantastical combinations, explains at once the phenom