which we cannot comprehend." They will inform you that the
resurrection is a miracle, a supernatural effect, which is to result
from the divine power. It is thus they overcome all the difficulties
which the good sense of a few opposes to their rhapsodies.

If, perchance, Madam, you do not wish to remain content with these
sublime reasons, against which your good sense will naturally revolt,
the clergy will endeavor to seduce your imagination by vague pictures
of the ineffable delights which will be enjoyed in Paradise by the
souls and bodies of those who have adopted their reveries; they will
aver that you cannot refuse to believe them upon their mere word
without encountering the eternal indignation of a God of pity; and
they will attempt to alarm your fancy by frightful delineations of the
cruel torments which a God of goodness has prepared for the greater
number of his creatures.

But if you consider the thing coolly, you will perceive the futility
of their flattering promises and of their puny threatenings, which are
uttered merely to catch the unwary. You may easily discover that if it
could be true that man shall survive himself, God, in recompensing
him, would only recompense himself for the grace which he had granted;
and when he punished him, he punished him for not receiving the grace
which he had hardened him against receiving. This line of conduct, so
cruel and barbarous, appears equally unworthy of a wise God as it is
of a being perfectly good.

If your mind, proof against the terrors with which the Christian
religion penetrates its sectaries, is capable of contemplating these
frightful circumstances, which it is imagined will accompany the
carefully-invented punishments which God has destined for the victims
of his vengeance, you will find that they are impossible, and totally
incompatible with the ideas which they themselves have put forth of
the Divinity. In a word, you will perceive that the chastisements of
another life are but a crowd of chimeras, invented to disturb human
reason, to subjugate it beneath the feet of imposture, to annihilate
forever the repose of slaves whom the priesthood would inthrall and
retain under its yoke.

In short, Eugenia, the priests would make you believe that these
torments will be horrible,--a thing which accords not with our ideas
of God's goodness; they tell you they will be eternal,--a thing which
accords not with our ideas of the justice of God, who, one would v