we
shall destroy those notions which nature gives us of Deity.

When we reflect on the Divinity, do we not see that mankind have
plunged farther and farther into darkness, as they assimilated him to
themselves; that their judgment is always disturbed when they would
make their Deity the object of their meditations; that they cannot
reason justly, because they never have any but obscure and absurd
ideas; that they are almost always in uncertainty, and never agree
with themselves, because their principles are replete with doubt; that
they always tremble, because they imagine that it is very dangerous to
be deceived; that they dispute without ceasing, because that it is
impossible to be convinced of any thing, when they reason on objects
of which they know nothing, and which the imaginations of men are
forced to paint differently; in fine, that they cruelly torment one
another about opinions equally uninteresting, though they attach to
them the greatest importance, and because the vanity of the one party
never allows it to subscribe to the reveries of the other?

It is thus that the Divinity has become to us a source of evil,
division, and quarrels; it is thus that his name alone inspires
terror; it is thus that religion has become the signal of so many
combats, and has always been the true apple of discord among unquiet
mortals, who always dispute with the greatest heat, on subjects of
which they can never have any true ideas. They make it a duty to think
and reason on his attributes; and they can never arrive at any just
conclusions, because their mind is never in a condition to form true
notions of what strikes their senses. In the impossibility of knowing
the Deity by themselves, they have recourse to the opinion of others,
whom they consider more adroit in theology, and who pretend to an
intimate acquaintance with God, being inspired by him, and having
secret intelligence of his purposes with regard to the human kind.
Those privileged men teach nothing to the nations of the earth, except
what their reveries have reduced to a system, without giving them
ideas that are clear and definite. They paint God under characters the
most agreeable to their own interests; they make of him a good monarch
for those who blindly submit to their tenets, but terrible to those
who refuse to blindly follow them.

Thus you perceive, Madam, what those men are who have obviously made
of the Deity an object so bizarre as they announce hi