ble Being as a capricious despot, and,
moreover, as a despot who knows every word we utter, we shall never
speak of him without the highest eulogy, just because we attribute to
him the most arbitrary tyranny. Hence, the invisible despot will
specially favour the priests whose lives are devoted to supporting his
authority, and, next to priests, those who, by the practice of
ceremonies painful or useless to themselves, show that their sole aim
is to give him pleasure. He will specially detest the atheists, and,
next to atheists, all who venture to disregard his arbitrary laws. A
human judge may be benevolent, because he is responsible to the
community. They give and can take away his power. But the invisible
and irresponsible ruler will have no motives for benevolence, and
approve conduct pernicious to men because it is the best proof of a
complete subservience to himself.[616] In spite of this, it has been
generally asserted that religion supplies a motive, and the only
adequate motive, to moral conduct. But the decay of religion would
leave the sources of pain and pleasure unchanged. To say, then, that
the conduct prescribed by religion would disappear if the religious
motives were removed is virtually to admit that it produces no
'temporal benefit.' Otherwise, the motives for practising such conduct
would not be affected. In fact, morality is the same in all countries,
though the injunctions of religion are various and contradictory. If
religion ordered only what is useful, it would coincide with human
laws, and be at worst superfluous. As a fact, it condemns the most
harmless pleasures, such as the worst of human legislators have never
sought to suppress. People have become tolerant, that is, they have
refused to enforce religious observances, precisely because they have
seen that such observances cannot be represented as conducive to
temporal happiness.

Duty, again, may be divided into duty to God and duty to man. Our
'duty to God' is a 'deduction from the pleasures of the individual
without at all benefiting the species.' It must therefore be taken as
a tax paid for the efficacy supposed to be communicated to the other
branch--the 'duty to man.'[617] Does religion, then, stimulate our
obedience to the code of duty to man? 'Philip Beauchamp' admits for
once that, in certain cases, it '_might possibly_' be useful. It might
affect 'secret crimes,' that is, crimes where the offender is
undiscoverable. That, however, i