notions of
their duties, as in charging their memories with mysteries,
unintelligible words, and obscure definitions which are impossible for
them to understand? How much time and trouble is lost in trying to teach
men things which are of no use to them. What resources for the public
benefit, for encouraging the progress of the sciences and the
advancement of knowledge, for the education of youth, are presented to
well-meaning sovereigns through so many monasteries, which, in a great
number of countries devour the people's substance without an equivalent.
But superstition, jealous of its exclusive empire, seems to have formed
but useless beings. What advantage could not be drawn from a multitude
of cenobites of both sexes whom we see in so many countries, and who are
so well paid to do nothing. Instead of occupying them with sterile
contemplations, with mechanical prayers, with monotonous practices;
instead of burdening them with fasts and austerities, let there be
excited among them a salutary emulation that would inspire them to seek
the means of serving usefully the world, which their fatal vows oblige
them to renounce. Instead of filling the youthful minds of their pupils
with fables, dogmas, and puerilities, why not invite or oblige the
priests to teach them true things, and so make of them citizens useful
to their country? The way in which men are brought up makes them useful
but to the clergy, who blind them, and to the tyrants, who plunder them.

CXCII.--THE RETRACTION OF AN UNBELIEVER AT THE HOUR OF DEATH, PROVES
NOTHING AGAINST INCREDULITY.

The adherents of credulity often accuse the unbelievers of bad faith
because they sometimes waver in their principles, changing opinions
during sickness, and retracting them at the hour of death. When the body
is diseased, the faculty of reasoning is generally disturbed also. The
infirm and decrepit man, in approaching his end, sometimes perceives
himself that reason is leaving him, he feels that prejudice returns.
There are diseases which have a tendency to lessen courage, to make
pusillanimous, and to enfeeble the brain; there are others which, in
destroying the body, do not affect the reason. However, an unbeliever
who retracts in sickness, is not more rare or more extraordinary than a
devotionist who permits himself, while in health, to neglect the duties
that his religion prescribes for him in the most formal manner.

Cleomenes, King of Sparta, having shown l