re, Madam, that our theological doctors pretend these
revealed books, which I summarily examined in my preceding letter, do
not include a single word that was not inspired by the Spirit of God.
What I have already said to you is sufficient to show that in setting
out with this supposition, the Divinity has formed a work the most
shapeless, imperfect, contradictory, and unintelligible which ever
existed; a work, in a word, of which any man of sense would blush with
shame to be the author. If any prophecy hath verified itself for the
Christians, it is that of Isaiah, which saith, "Hearing ye shall hear,
but shall not understand." But in this case we reply that it was
sufficiently useless to speak not to be comprehended; to reveal _that_
which cannot be comprehended is to reveal _nothing_.

We need not, then, be surprised if the Christians, notwithstanding the
revelation of which they assure us they have been the favorites, have
no precise ideas either of the Divinity, or of his will, or the way in
which his oracles are to be interpreted. The book from which they
should be able to do so serves only to confound the simplest notions,
to throw them into the greatest incertitude, and create eternal
disputations. If it was the project of the Divinity, it would,
without doubt, be attended with perfect success. The teachers of
Christianity never agree on the manner in which they are to understand
the truths that God has given himself the trouble to reveal; all the
efforts which they have employed to this time have not yet been
capable of making any thing clear, and the dogmas which they have
successively invented have been insufficient to justify to the
understanding of one man of good sense the conduct of an infinitely
perfect Being.

Hence, many among them, perceiving the inconveniences which would
result from the reading of the holy books, have carefully kept them
out of the hands of the vulgar and illiterate; for they plainly
foresaw that if they were read by such they would necessarily bring on
themselves reproach, since it would never fail that every honest man
of good sense would discover in those books only a crowd of
absurdities. Thus the oracles of God are not even made for those for
whom they are addressed; it is requisite to be initiated in the
mysteries of a priesthood, to have the privilege of discerning in the
holy writings the light which the Divinity destined to all his dear
children. But are the theologians th