y; because, being equally
founded on ancient tradition, they were equally sacred. You know how the
government, after three centuries, having embraced one of these sects,
made it the orthodox, that is to say, the pre-dominant religion, to the
exclusion of the rest; which, being less in number, became heretics; you
know how and by what means of violence and seduction this religion was
propagated, extended, divided, and enfeebled; how, six hundred years
after the Christian innovation, another system was formed from it and
from that of the Jews; and how Mahomet found the means of composing a
political and theological empire at the expense of those of Moses and
the vicars of Jesus.

"Now, if you take a review of the whole history of the spirit of all
religion, you will see that in its origin it has had no other author
than the sensations and wants of man; that the idea of God has had no
other type and model than those of physical powers, material beings,
producing either good or evil, by impressions of pleasure or pain on
sensitive beings; that in the formation of all these systems the spirit
of religion has always followed the same course, and been uniform in
its proceedings; that in all of them the dogma has never failed to
represent, under the name of gods, the operations of nature, and
passions and prejudices of men; that the moral of them all has had for
its object the desire of happiness and the aversion to pain; but that
the people, and the greater part of legislators, not knowing the route
to be pursued, have formed false, and therefore discordant, ideas of
virtue and vice of good and evil, that is to say, of what renders man
happy or miserable; that in every instance, the means and the causes of
propagating and establishing systems have exhibited the same scenes of
passion and the same events; everywhere disputes about words, pretexts
for zeal, revolutions and wars excited by the ambition of princes, the
knavery of apostles, the credulity of proselytes, the ignorance of the
vulgar, the exclusive cupidity and intolerant arrogance of all. Indeed,
you will see that the whole history of the spirit of religion is only
the history of the errors of the human mind, which, placed in a world
that it does not comprehend, endeavors nevertheless to solve the enigma;
and which, beholding with astonishment this mysterious and visible
prodigy, imagines causes, supposes reasons, builds systems; then,
finding one defective, destroys