ontribute to render us favorable to a hidden God, who attaches his
favor to practices and opinions that are too often hurtful to
ourselves, and little beneficial to others. The morality of the
Christians is a mystic morality, which resembles the dogmas of their
religion; it is obscure, unintelligible, uncertain, and subject to the
interpretation of frail creatures. This morality is never fixed,
because it is subordinate to a religion which varies incessantly its
principles, and which is regulated according to the pleasure of a
despotic divinity, and, more especially, according to the pleasure of
priests, whose interests are changing daily, whose caprices are as
variable as the hours of their existence, and who are, consequently,
not always in agreement with one another. The writings which are the
sources whence the Christians have drawn their morality, are not only
an abyss of obscurity, but demand continual explications from their
masters, the priests, who, in explaining, make them still more
obscure, still more contradictory. If these oracles of heaven
prescribe to us in one place the virtues truly useful, in another part
they approve, or prescribe, actions entirely opposed to all the ideas
that we have of virtue. The same God who orders us to be good,
equitable, and beneficent, who forbids the revenging of injuries, who
declares himself to be the God of clemency and of goodness, shows
himself to be implacable in his rage; announces himself as bringing
_the sword, and not peace_; tells us that he is come to set mankind at
variance; and, finally, in order to revenge his wrongs, orders rapine,
treason, usurpation, and carnage. In a word, it is impossible to find
in the Scriptures any certain principles or sure rules of morality.
You there see, in one part, a small number of precepts, useful and
intelligible, and in another part maxims the most extravagant, and the
most destructive to the good and happiness of all society.

It is in punctuality to fulfil the superstitious and frivolous duties,
that the morality of the Jews in the Old Testament writings is chiefly
conspicuous; legal observances, rites, ceremonies, are all that
occupied the people of Israel. In recompense for their scrupulous
exactness to fulfil these duties, they were permitted to commit the
most frightful of crimes. The virtues recommended by the Son of God,
in the New Testament, are not in reality the same as those which God
the Father had made observab