ples of whom
they ought to be the leaders, the protectors, and fathers? Let us open
our eyes, let us turn our regards upon all the earth, and we shall see,
almost everywhere, men governed by tyrants, who make use of religion but
to brutalize their slaves, whom they oppress by the weight of their
vices, or whom they sacrifice without mercy to their fatal
extravagances. Far from being a restraint to the passions of kings,
religion, by its very principles, gives them a loose rein. It transforms
them into Divinities, whose caprices the nations never dare to resist.
At the same time that it unchains princes and breaks for them the ties
of the social pact, it enchains the minds and the hands of their
oppressed subjects. Is it surprising, then, that the gods of the earth
believe that all is permitted to them, and consider their subjects as
vile instruments of their caprices or of their ambition?

Religion, in every country, has made of the Monarch of Nature a cruel,
fantastic, partial tyrant, whose caprice is the rule. The God-monarch is
but too well imitated by His representatives upon the earth. Everywhere
religion seems invented but to lull to sleep the people in fetters, in
order to furnish their masters the facility of devouring them, or to
render them miserable with impunity.

CXLIV.--ORIGIN OF THE MOST ABSURD, THE MOST RIDICULOUS, AND THE MOST
ODIOUS USURPATION, CALLED THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. WISE COUNSELS TO
KINGS.

In order to guard themselves against the enterprises of a haughty
Pontiff who desired to reign over kings, and in order to protect their
persons from the attacks of the credulous people excited by their
priests, several princes of Europe pretended to have received their
crowns and their rights from God alone, and that they should account to
Him only for their actions. Civil power in its battles against spiritual
power, having at length gained the advantage, and the priests being
compelled to yield, recognized the Divine right of kings and preached it
to the people, reserving to themselves the right to change opinions and
to preach revolution, every time that the divine rights of kings did not
agree with the divine rights of the clergy. It was always at the expense
of the people that peace was restored between the kings and the priests,
but the latter maintained their pretensions notwithstanding all
treaties.

Many tyrants and wicked princes, whose conscience reproaches them for
their negligenc