s predictions, frightful menaces, and
above all, systems so profound that they who announce are not able to
comprehend them. In truth, Madam, in all this I can see nothing
useful. Should nations feel any extraordinary obligations to teachers
who concoct doctrines that must always remain impenetrable for the
whole human race? It must be confessed that our priests, who so
painfully occupy themselves in arranging a pure creed for us, must
signally lose all their labor. At any rate, the people are not much in
the situation to profit by such sublime toils. Very frequently the
pulpit becomes the theatre of discord; the sacred disclaimers launch
injuries at each other, infusing their own passions into the bosoms of
their _Christian_ auditors, kindling their zeal against the enemies of
the church, and becoming themselves the trumpets of party spirit,
fury, and sedition. If these preachers teach morality, it is a kind of
supernatural morality, little adapted to the nature of man. If they
inculcate virtue, it is that theological virtue whose inutility we
have sufficiently shown. If by chance some one among them allows
himself to preach that morality and virtue which is practical, human,
and social, you know, Madam, that he is proscribed by his
confederates, and becomes an object of their acrimonious criticisms
and their deadly hatred. He is also disdained by devotees who are
attached to evangelical virtues that they cannot comprehend, and who
consider nothing as more important than mysterious forms and
ceremonies, in which zealots make morality to consist.

See, then, in what limits are entertained the important services that
the ministers of the Lord have for so many centuries rendered to
nations! They are not worth, in all conscience, the excessive price
which is paid for them. On the contrary, if priests were treated
according to their real merit, if their functions were appreciated at
their just value, it would, perhaps, be found that they did not merit
a larger salary than those empirics who, at the corners of the
streets, vend remedies more dangerous than the evils they promise to
cure.

It is by subjecting the immense revenues, lands, abbeys, and estates,
which clerical bodies have levied upon the credulity of men, to just
and equal taxation, as with other property; it is by rendering the
church and state entirely distinct; it is by stripping the hierarchy
of immunities not possessed by other citizens, and of privileges