servility,
and ignorance.

If, as is the fact, our own experience and that of others daily teaches
us that what at one time appeared true, afterwards appeared demonstrably
false, how can we connect with our judgments that blind and presumptuous
confidence which pursues those of others with so much hatred?

No doubt it is reasonable, and even honest, to act according to our
present feelings and conviction: but if these feelings and their causes
do vary by the very nature of things, how dare we impose upon ourselves
or others an invariable conviction? How, above all, dare we require this
conviction in cases where there is really no sensation, as happens
in purely speculative questions, in which no palpable fact can be
presented?

Therefore, when opening the book of nature, (a more authentic one and
more easy to be read than leaves of paper blackened over with Greek or
Hebrew,) and when I reflected that the slightest change in the material
world has not been in times past, nor is at present effected by the
difference of so many religions and sects which have appeared and still
exist on the globe, and that the course of the seasons, the path of the
sun, the return of rain and drought, are the same for the inhabitants
of each country, whether Christians, Mussulmans, Idolaters, Catholics,
Protestants, etc., I am induced to believe that the universe is governed
by laws of wisdom and justice, very different from those which human
ignorance and intolerance would enact.

And as in living with men of very opposite religious persuasions, I
have had occasion to remark that their manners were, nevertheless, very
analogous; that is to say, among the different Christian sects, among
the Mahometans, and even among those people who were of no sect, I have
found men who practise all the virtues, public and private, and that too
without affectation; while others, who were incessantly declaiming of
God and religion, abandoned themselves to every vicious habit which
their belief condemned, I thereby became convinced that Ethics,
the doctrines of morality, are the only essential, as they are only
demonstrable, part of religion. And as, by your own avowal, the only end
of religion is to render men better, in order to add to their happiness,
p. 62, I have concluded that there are but two great systems of religion
in the world, that of good sense and beneficence, and that of malice and
hypocrisy.

In closing this letter, I find myself emb