ry; thoughts which he himself puts into their heads; and who
condemns them to eternal punishments if they believe not in reveries
that are incompatible with the divine attributes, or who dare to doubt
whether God can possess qualities that are not capable of being
reconciled among themselves.

Is it, then, surprising that so many good people are shocked at the
revolting ideas, so contradictory and so appalling, which hurl mortals
into a state of uncertainty and doubt as to the existence of the
Deity, or even to force them into absolute denial of the same? It is
impossible to admit, in effect, the doctrine of the Deity of
priestcraft, in which we constantly see infinite perfections, allied
with imperfections the most striking; in which, when we reflect but
momentarily, we shall find that it cannot produce but disorder in the
imagination, and leaves it wandering among errors that reduce it to
despair, or some impostors, who, to subjugate mankind, have wished to
throw them into embarrassment, confound their reason, and fill them
with terror. Such appear, in effect, to be the motives of those who
have the arrogance to pretend to a secret knowledge, which they
distribute among mankind, though they have no knowledge even of
themselves. They always paint God under the traits of an inaccessible
tyrant, who never shows himself but to his ministers and favorites,
who please to veil him from the eyes of the vulgar; and who are
violently irritated when they find any who oppose their pretensions,
or when they refuse to believe the priests and their unintelligible
farragoes.

If, as I have often said, it be impossible to believe what we cannot
comprehend, or to be intimately convinced of that of which we can form
no distinct and clear ideas, we may thence conclude that, when the
Christians assure us they believe that God has announced himself in
some secret and peculiar way to them that he has not done to other
men, either they are themselves deceived, or they wish to deceive us.
Their faith, or their belief in God, is merely an acceptance of what
their priests have taught them of a Being whose existence they have
rendered more than doubtful to those who would reason and meditate.
The Deity cannot, assuredly, be the being whom the Christians admit on
the word of their theologians. Is there, in good truth, a man in the
world who can form any idea of a spirit? If we ask the priests what a
spirit is, they will tell us that a spirit is