o render them happy.
Sovereigns! It is not the Gods, but your people whom you offend when you
do evil. It is to these people, and by retroaction, to yourselves, that
you do harm when you govern unjustly.

Nothing is more common in history than to see religious tyrants; nothing
more rare than to find equitable, vigilant, enlightened princes. A
monarch can be pious, very strict in fulfilling servilely the duties of
his religion, very submissive to his priests, liberal in their behalf,
and at the same time destitute of all the virtues and talents necessary
for governing. Religion for the princes is but an instrument intended to
keep the people more firmly under the yoke. According to the beautiful
principles of religious morality, a tyrant who, during a long reign,
will have done nothing but oppress his subjects, rob them of the fruits
of their labor, sacrifice them without pity to his insatiable ambition;
a conqueror who will have usurped the provinces of others, who will have
slaughtered whole nations, who will have been all his life a real
scourge of the human race, imagines that his conscience can be
tranquillized, if, in order to expiate so many crimes, he will have wept
at the feet of a priest, who will have the cowardly complaisance to
console and reassure a brigand, whom the most frightful despair would
punish too little for the evil which he has done upon earth.

CLXIX.--A RELIGIOUS KING IS A SCOURGE TO HIS KINGDOM.

A sincerely religious sovereign is generally a very dangerous chief for
a State; credulity always indicates a narrow mind; devotion generally
absorbs the attention which the prince ought to give to the ruling of
his people. Docile to the suggestions of his priests, he constantly
becomes the toy of their caprices, the abettor of their quarrels, the
instrument and the accomplice of their follies, to which he attaches the
greatest importance. Among the most fatal gifts which religion has
bestowed upon the world, we must consider above all, these devoted and
zealous monarchs, who, with the idea of working for the salvation of
their subjects, have made it their sacred duty to torment, to persecute,
to destroy those whose conscience made them think otherwise than they
do. A religious bigot at the head of an empire, is one of the greatest
scourges which Heaven in its fury could have sent upon earth. One
fanatical or deceitful priest who has the ear of a credulous and
powerful prince, suffices to put