s life in trembling at
phantoms which are made but to intimidate silly women or children. If,
sometimes, libertinage, which reasons but little, leads to irreligion,
the man who is regular in his morals can have very legitimate motives
for examining his religion, and for banishing it from his mind. Too weak
to intimidate the wicked, in whom vice has become deeply rooted,
religious terrors afflict, torment, and burden imaginative minds. If
souls have courage and elasticity, they shake off a yoke which they bear
unwillingly. If weak or timorous, they wear the yoke during their whole
life, and they grow old, trembling, or at least they live under
burdensome uncertainty.

The priests have made of God such a malicious, ferocious being, so ready
to be vexed, that there are few men in the world who do not wish at the
bottom of their hearts that this God did not exist. We can not live
happy if we are always in fear. You worship a terrible God, O religious
people! Alas! And yet you hate Him; you wish that He was not. Can we
avoid wishing the absence or the destruction of a master, the idea of
whom can but torment the mind? It is the dark colors in which the
priests paint the Deity which revolt men, moving them to hate and
reject Him.

CLXXXIII.--FEAR ALONE CREATES THEISTS AND BIGOTS.

If fear has created the Gods, fear still holds their empire in the mind
of mortals; they have been so early accustomed to tremble even at the
name of the Deity, that it has become for them a specter, a goblin, a
were-wolf which torments them, and whose idea deprives them even of the
courage to attempt to reassure themselves. They are afraid that this
invisible specter will strike them if they cease to be afraid. The
religious people fear their God too much to love Him sincerely; they
serve Him as slaves, who can not escape His power, and take the part of
flattering their Master; and who, by continually lying, persuade
themselves that they love Him. They make a virtue of necessity. The love
of religious bigots for their God, and of slaves for their despots, is
but a servile and simulated homage which they render by compulsion, in
which the heart has no part.

CLXXXIV.--CAN WE, OR SHOULD WE, LOVE OR NOT LOVE GOD?

The Christian Doctors have made their God so little worthy of love, that
several among them have thought it their duty not to love Him; this is a
blasphemy which makes less sincere doctors tremble. Saint Thomas, having
asse