; where this God permits wicked spirits and magicians to perform
as wonderful miracles as those of His servants; where it is prophesied
that the Anti-Christ will have the power to perform miracles capable of
destroying the faith even of the elect? This granted, how can we know
whether God wants to instruct us or to lay a snare for us? How can we
distinguish whether the wonders which we see, proceed from God or the
Devil? Pascal, in order to disembarrass us, says very gravely, that we
must judge the doctrine by miracles, and the miracles by the doctrine;
that doctrine judges the miracles, and the miracles judge the doctrine.
If there exists a defective and ridiculous circle, it is no doubt in
this fine reasoning of one of the greatest defenders of the Christian
religion. Which of all the religions in the world does not claim to
possess the most admirable doctrine, and which does not bring to its aid
a great number of miracles?

Is a miracle capable of destroying a demonstrated truth? Although a man
should have the secret of curing all diseases, of making the lame to
walk, of raising all the dead of a city, of floating in the air, of
arresting the course of the sun and of the moon, will he be able to
convince me by all this that two and two do not make four; that one
makes three and that three makes but one; that a God who fills the
universe with His immensity, could have transformed Himself into the
body of a Jew; that the eternal can perish like man; that an immutable,
foreseeing, and sensible God could have changed His opinion upon His
religion, and reform His own work by a new revelation?

CXXXI.--EVEN ACCORDING TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THEOLOGY ITSELF, EVERY NEW
REVELATION SHOULD BE REFUTED AS FALSE AND IMPIOUS.

According to the principles of theology itself, whether natural or
revealed, every new revelation ought to be considered false; every
change in a religion which had emanated from the Deity ought to be
refuted as ungodly and blasphemous. Does not every reform suppose that
God did not know how at the start to give His religion the required
solidity and perfection? To say that God in giving a first law
accommodated Himself to the gross ideas of a people whom He wished to
enlighten, is to pretend that God neither could nor would make the
people whom He enlightened at that time, as reasonable as they ought to
be to please Him.

Christianity is an impiety, if it is true that Judaism as a religion
reall