Among these benefactions, which
you boast of, and which your enthusiasm alone sees, I see a multitude of
evils of all kinds, upon which you obstinately close your eyes.

Compelled to acknowledge that your good God, in contradiction with
Himself, distributes with the same hand good and evil, you will find
yourself obliged, in order to justify Him, to send me, as the priests
would, to the other life. Invent, then, another God than the one of
theology, because your God is as contradictory as its God is. A good God
who does evil or who permits it to be done, a God full of equity and in
an empire where innocence is so often oppressed; a perfect God who
produces but imperfect and wretched works; such a God and His conduct,
are they not as great mysteries as that of the incarnation? You blush,
you say, for your fellow beings who are persuaded that the God of the
universe could change Himself into a man and die upon a cross in a
corner of Asia. You consider the ineffable mystery of the Trinity very
absurd Nothing appears more ridiculous to you than a God who changes
Himself into bread and who is eaten every day in a thousand different
places.

Well! are all these mysteries any more shocking to reason than a God who
punishes and rewards men's actions? Man, according to your views, is he
free or not? In either case your God, if He has the shadow of justice,
can neither punish him nor reward him. If man is free, it is God who
made him free to act or not to act; it is God, then, who is the
primitive cause of all his actions; in punishing man for his faults, He
would punish him for having done that which He gave him the liberty to
do. If man is not free to act otherwise than he does, would not God be
the most unjust of beings to punish him for the faults which he could
not help committing? Many persons are struck with the detail of
absurdities with which all religions of the world are filled; but they
have not the courage to seek for the source whence these absurdities
necessarily sprung. They do not see that a God full of contradictions,
of oddities, of incompatible qualities, either inflaming or nursing the
imagination of men, could create but a long line of idle fancies.

CXIX.--WE DO NOT PROVE AT ALL THE EXISTENCE OF A GOD BY SAYING THAT IN
ALL AGES EVERY NATION HAS ACKNOWLEDGED SOME KIND OF DIVINITY.

They believe, to silence those who deny the existence of a God, by
telling them that all men, in all ages and in al