y emanated from a Holy, Immutable, Almighty, grid Foreseeing God.

Christ's religion implies either defects in the law that God Himself
gave by Moses, or impotence or malice in this God who could not, or
would not make the Jews as they ought to be to please Him. All
religions, whether new, or ancient ones reformed, are evidently founded
on the weakness, the inconstancy, the imprudence, and the malice of the
Deity.

CXXXII.--EVEN THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS, TESTIFIES AGAINST THE TRUTH OF
MIRACLES AND AGAINST THE DIVINE ORIGIN WHICH CHRISTIANITY CLAIMS.

If history informs me that the first apostles, founders or reformers of
religions, performed great miracles, history teaches me also that these
reforming apostles and their adherents have been usually despised,
persecuted, and put to death as disturbers of the peace of nations. I am
then tempted to believe that they have not performed the miracles
attributed to them. Finally, these miracles should have procured to them
a great number of disciples among those who witnessed them, who ought to
have prevented the performers from being maltreated. My incredulity
increases if I am told that the performers of miracles have been cruelly
tormented or slain. How can we believe that missionaries, protected by a
God, invested with His Divine Power, and enjoying the gift of miracles,
could not perform the simple miracle of escaping from the cruelty of
their persecutors?

Persecutions themselves are considered as a convincing proof in favor of
the religion of those who have suffered them; but a religion which
boasts of having caused the death of many martyrs, and which informs us
that its founders have suffered for its extension unheard-of torments,
can not be the religion of a benevolent, equitable, and Almighty God. A
good God would not permit that men charged with revealing His will
should be misused. An omnipotent God desiring to found a religion, would
have employed simpler and less fatal means for His most faithful
servants. To say that God desired that His religion should be sealed by
blood, is to say that this God is weak, unjust, ungrateful, and
sanguinary, and that He sacrifices unworthily His missionaries to the
interests of His ambition.

CXXXIII.--THE FANATICISM OF THE MARTYRS, THE INTERESTED ZEAL OF
MISSIONARIES, PROVE IN NOWISE THE TRUTH OF RELIGION.

To die for a religion does not prove it true or Divine; this proves at
most that we suppose it to be