spirits, of which everybody speaks, and which nobody ever saw or ever will see!
THEISM.
Theism is a religion diffused through all religions; it is a metal which mixes itself with all the others, the veins of which extend under ground to the four corners of the world. This mine is more openly worked in China; everywhere else it is hidden, and the secret is only in the hands of the adepts.
There is no country where there are more of these adepts than in England. In the last century there were many atheists in that country, as well as in France and Italy. What the chancellor Bacon had said proved true to the letter, that a little philosophy makes a man an atheist, and that much philosophy leads to the knowledge of a God. When it was believed with Epicurus, that chance made everything, or with Aristotle, and even with several ancient theologians, that nothing was created but through corruption, and that by matter and motion alone the world goes on, then it was impossible to believe in a providence. But since nature has been looked into, which the ancients did not perceive at all; since it is observed that all is organized, that everything has its germ; since it is well known that a mushroom is the work of infinite wisdom, as well as all the worlds; then those who thought, adored in the countries where their ancestors had blasphemed. The physicians are become the heralds of providence; a catechist announces God to children, and a Newton demonstrates Him to the learned.
Many persons ask whether theism, considered abstractedly, and without any religious ceremony, is in fact a religion? The answer is easy: he who recognizes only a creating God, he who views in God only a Being infinitely powerful, and who sees in His creatures only wonderful machines, is not religious towards Him any more than a European, admiring the king of China, would thereby profess allegiance to that prince. But he who thinks that God has deigned to place a relation between Himself and mankind; that He has made him free, capable of good and evil; that He has given all of them that good sense which is the instinct of man, and on which the law of nature is founded; such a one undoubtedly has a religion, and a much better religion than all those sects who are beyond the pale of our Church; for all these sects are false, and the law of nature is true. Thus, theism is good sense not yet instructed by revelation; and other religions are good sense perverted by superstition.
All sects differ, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same because it comes from God. It is asked why, out of five or six hundred sects, there have scarcely been any who have not spilled blood; and why the theists, who are everywhere so numerous, have never caused the least disturbance? It is because they are philosophers. Now philosophers may reason badly, but they never intrigue. Those who persecute a philosopher, under the pretext that his opinions may be dangerous to the public, are as absurd as those who are afraid that the study of algebra will raise the price of bread in the market; one must pity a thinking being who errs; the persecutor is frantic and horrible.
We are all brethren; if one of my brothers, full of respect and filial love, inspired by the most fraternal charity, does not salute our common Father with the same ceremonies as I do, ought I to cut his throat and tear out his heart?
What is a true theist? It is he who says to God: "I adore and serve You;" it is he who says to the Turk, to the Chinese, the Indian, and the Russian: "I love you." He doubts, perhaps, that Mahomet made a journey to the moon and put half of it in his pocket; he does not wish that after his death his wife should burn herself from devotion; he is sometimes tempted not to believe the story of the eleven thousand virgins, and that of St. Amable, whose hat and gloves were carried by a ray of the sun from Auvergne as far as Rome.
But for all that he is a just man. Noah would have placed him in his ark, Numa Pompilius in his councils; he would have ascended the car of Zoroaster; he would have talked philosophy with the Platos, the Aristippuses, the Ciceros, the Atticuses--but would he not have drunk hemlock with Socrates?
THEIST.
The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a Supreme Being equally good and powerful, who has formed all extended, vegetating, sentient, and reflecting existences; who perpetuates their species, who punishes crimes without cruelty, and rewards virtuous actions with kindness.
The theist does not know how God punishes, how He rewards, how He pardons; for he is not presumptuous enough to flatter himself that he understands how God acts; but he knows that God does act, and that He is just. The difficulties opposed to a providence do not stagger him in his faith, because they are only great difficulties, not proofs; he submits himself to that providence, although he only perceives some of its effects and some appearances; and judging of the things he does not see from those he does see, he thinks that this providence pervades all places and all ages.
United in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not join any of the sects, who all contradict themselves; his religion is the most ancient and the most extended; for the simple adoration of a God has preceded all the systems in the world. He speaks a language which all nations understand, while they are unable to understand each other's. He has brethren from Pekin to Cayenne, and he reckons all the wise his brothers. He believes that religion consists neither in the opinions of incomprehensible metaphysics, nor in vain decorations, but in adoration and justice. To do good--that is his worship; to submit oneself to God--that is his doctrine. The Mahometan cries out to him: "Take care of yourself, if you do not make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
"Woe be to thee," says a Franciscan, "if thou dost not make a journey to our Lady of Loretto." He laughs at Loretto and Mecca; but he succors the indigent and defends the oppressed.
THEOCRACY.
_Government of God or Gods._ I deceive myself every day; but I suspect that all the nations who have cultivated the arts have lived under a theocracy. I always except the Chinese, who appear learned as soon as they became a nation. They were free from superstition directly China was a kingdom. It is a great pity, that having been raised so high at first, they should remain stationary at the degree they have so long occupied in the sciences. It would seem that they have received from nature an ample allowance of good sense, and a very small one of industry. Yet in other things their industry is displayed more than ours.
The Japanese, their neighbors, of whose origin I know nothing whatever--for whose origin do we know?--were incontestably governed by a theocracy. The earliest well-ascertained sovereigns were the "_dairos_," the high priests of their gods; this theocracy is well established.
These priests reigned despotically about eight hundred years. In the middle of our twelfth century it came to pass that a captain, an "_imperator_," a "_seogon_" shared their authority; and in our sixteenth century the captains seized the whole power, and kept it. The "_dairos_" have remained the heads of religion; they were kings--they are now only saints; they regulate festivals, they bestow sacred titles, but they cannot give a company of infantry.
The Brahmins in India possessed for a long time the theocratical power; that is to say, they held the sovereign authority in the name of Brahma, the son of God; and even in their present humble condition they still believe their character indelible. These are the two principal among the certain theocracies.
The priests of Chaldæa, Persia, Syria, Phœnicia, and Egypt, were so powerful, had so great a share in the government, and carried the censer so loftily above the sceptre, that empire may be said, among those nations, to nave been divided between theocracy and royalty.
The government of Numa Pompilius was evidently theocratical. When a man says: "I give you laws furnished by the gods; it is not I, it is a god who speaks to you"--then it is God who is king, and he who talks thus is lieutenant-general.
Among all the Celtic nations who had only elective chiefs, and not kings, the Druids and their sorceries governed everything. But I cannot venture to give the name of theocracy to the anarchy of these savages.
The little Jewish nation does not deserve to be considered politically, except on account of the prodigious revolution that has occurred in the world, of which it was the very obscure and unconscious cause.
Do but consider the history of this strange people. They have a conductor who undertakes to guide them in the name of his God to Phœnicia, which he calls Canaan. The way was direct and plain, from the country of Goshen as far as Tyre, from south to north; and there was no danger for six hundred and thirty thousand fighting men, having at their head a general like Moses, who, according to Flavius Josephus, had already vanquished an army of Ethiopians, and even an army of serpents.
Instead of taking this short and easy route, he conducts them from Rameses to Baal-Sephon, in an opposite direction, right into the middle of Egypt, due south. He crosses the sea; he marches for forty years in the most frightful deserts, where there is not a single spring of water, or a tree, or a cultivated field--nothing but sand and dreary rocks. It is evident that God alone could make the Jews, by a miracle, take this route, and support them there by a succession of miracles.
The Jewish government therefore was then a true theocracy. Moses, however, was never pontiff, and Aaron, who was pontiff, was never chief nor legislator. After that time we do not find any pontiff governing.
Joshua, Jephthah, Samson, and the other chiefs of the people, except Elias and Samuel, were not priests. The Jewish republic, reduced to slavery so often, was anarchical rather than theocratical.
Under the kings of Judah and Israel, it was but a long succession of assassinations and civil wars. These horrors were interrupted only by the entire extinction of ten tribes, afterwards by the enslavement of two others, and by the destruction of the city amidst famine and pestilence. This was not then divine government.
When the Jewish slaves returned to Jerusalem, they were subdued by the kings of Persia, by the conqueror Alexandria and his successors. It appears that God did not then reign immediately over this nation, since a little before the invasion of Alexander, the pontiff John assassinated the priest Jesus, his brother, in the temple of Jerusalem, as Solomon had assassinated his brother Adonijah on the altar.
The government was still less theocratical when Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, employed many of the Jews to punish those whom he regarded as rebels. He forbade them all, under pain of death, to circumcise their children; he compelled them to sacrifice swine in their temple, to burn the gates, to destroy the altar; and the whole enclosure was filled with thorns and brambles.
Matthias rose against him at the head of some citizens, but he was not king. His son, Judas Maccabæus, taken for the Messiah, perished after glorious struggles. To these bloody contests succeeded civil wars. The men of Jerusalem destroyed Samaria, which the Romans subsequently rebuilt under the name of Sebasta.
In this chaos of revolutions, Aristobulus, of the race of the Maccabees, and son of a high priest, made himself king, more than five hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem. He signalized his reign like some Turkish sultans, by cutting his brother's throat, and causing his mother to be put to death. His successors followed his example, until the period when the Romans punished all these barbarians. Nothing in all this is theocratical.
If anything affords an idea of theocracy, it must be granted that it is the papacy of Rome; it never announces itself but in the name of God, and its subjects live in peace. For a long time Thibet enjoyed the same advantages under the Grand Lama; but that is a gross error striving to imitate a sublime truth.
The first Incas, by calling themselves descendants in a right line from the sun, established a theocracy; everything was done in the name of the sun. Theocracy ought to be universal; for every man, whether a prince or a boatman, should obey the natural and eternal laws which God has given him.
THEODOSIUS.
Every prince who puts himself at the head of a party, and succeeds, is sure of being praised to all eternity, if the party lasts that time; and his adversaries may be assured that they will be treated by orators, poets, and preachers, as Titans who revolted against the gods. This is what happened to Octavius Augustus, when his good fortune made him defeat Brutus, Cassius, and Antony. It was the lot of Constantine, when Maxentius, the legitimate emperor, elected by the Roman senate and people, fell into the water and was drowned.
Theodosius had the same advantage. Woe to the vanquished! blessed be the victorious!--that is the motto of mankind. Theodosius was a Spanish officer, the son of a Spanish soldier of fortune. As soon as he was emperor he persecuted the anti-consubstantialists. Judge of the applauses, benedictions, and pompous eulogies, on the part of the consubstantialists! Their adversaries scarcely subsist any longer; their complaints and clamors against the tyranny of Theodosius have perished with them, and the predominant party still lavishes on this prince the epithets of pious, just, clement, wise, and great.
One day this pious and clement prince, who loved money to distraction, proposed laying a very heavy tax upon the city of Antioch, then the finest of Asia Minor. The people, in despair, having demanded a slight diminution, and not being able to obtain it, went so far as to break some statues, among which was one of the soldier, the emperor's father.
St. John Chrysostom, or golden mouth, the priest and flatterer of Theodosius, failed not to call this action a detestable sacrilege, since Theodosius was the image of God, and his father was almost as sacred as himself. But if this Spaniard resembled God, he should have remembered that the Antiochians also resembled Him, and that men formed after the exemplar of all the gods existed before emperors.
_Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum._ Theodosius immediately sent a letter to the governor, with an order to apply the torture to the principal images of God who had taken part in this passing sedition; to make them perish under blows received from cords terminated with leaden balls; to burn some, and deliver others up to the sword. This was executed with all the punctuality of a governor who did his duty like a Christian, who paid his court well, and who would make his way there. The Orontes bore nothing but corpses to the sea for several days; after which, his gracious imperial majesty pardoned the Antiochians with his usual clemency, and doubled the tax.
How did the emperor Julian act in the same city, when he had received a more personal and injurious outrage? It was not a paltry statue of his father which they defaced; it was to himself that the Antiochians addressed themselves, and against whom they composed the most violent satires. The philosophical emperor answered them by a light and ingenious satire. He took from them neither their lives nor their purses. He contented himself with having more wit than they had. This is the man whom St. Gregory Nazianzen and Theodoret, who were not of his communion, dare to calumniate so far as to say that he sacrificed women and children to the moon; while those who were of the communion of Theodosius have persisted to our day in copying one another, by saying in a hundred ways, that Theodosius was the most virtuous of men, and by wishing to make him a saint.
We know well enough what was the mildness of this saint in the massacre of fifteen thousand of his subjects at Thessalonica. His panegyrists reduce the number of the murdered to seven or eight thousand, which is a very small number to them; but they elevate to the sky the tender piety of this good prince, who deprived himself of mass, as also that of his accomplice, the detestable Rufinus. I confess once more, that it was a great expiation, a great act of devotion, the not going to mass; but it restores not life to fifteen thousand innocents, slain in cold blood by an abominable perfidy. If a heretic was stained with such a crime, with what pleasure would all historians turn their boasting against him; with what colors would they paint him in the pulpits and college declamations!
I will suppose that the prince of Parma entered Paris, after having forced our dear Henry IV. to raise the siege; I will suppose that Philip II. gave the throne of France to his Catholic daughter, and to the young Catholic duke of Guise; how many pens and voices would forever have anathematized Henry IV., and the Salic law! They would be both forgotten, and the Guises would be the heroes of the state and religion.
Thus it is--applaud the prosperous and fly the miserable! "_Et cole felices, miseros fuge._" If Hugh Capet dispossess the legitimate heir of Charlemagne, he becomes the root of a race of heroes. If he fails, he may be treated as the brother of St. Louis since treated Conradin and the duke of Austria, and with much more reason.
Pepin rebels, dethrones the Merovingian race, and shuts his king in a cloister; but if he succeeds not, he mounts the scaffold. If Clovis, the first king of Belgic Gaul, is beaten in his invasion, he runs the risk of being condemned to the fangs of beasts, as one of his ancestors was by Constantine. Thus goes the world under the empire of fortune, which is nothing but necessity, insurmountable fatality. "_Fortuna sævo læta negotio._" She makes us blindly play her terrible game, and we never see beneath the cards.
THEOLOGIAN.
SECTION I.
The theologian knows perfectly that, according to St. Thomas, angels are corporeal with relation to God; that the soul receives its being in the body; and that man has a vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual soul; that the soul is all in all, and all in every part; that it is the efficient and formal cause of the body; that it is the greatest in nobleness of form; that the appetite is a passive power; that archangels are the medium between angels and principalities; that baptism regenerates of itself and by chance; that the catechism is not a sacrament, but sacramental; that certainty springs from the cause and subject; that concupiscence is the appetite of sensitive delectation; that conscience is an act and not a power.
The angel of the schools has written about four thousand fine pages in this style, and a shaven-crowned young man passes three years in filling his brain with this sublime knowledge; after which he receives the bonnet of a doctor of the Sorbonne, instead of going to Bedlam. If he is a man of quality, or the son of a rich man, or intriguing and fortunate, he becomes bishop, archbishop, cardinal, and pope.
If he is poor and without credit, he becomes the chaplain of one of these people; it is he who preaches for them, who reads St. Thomas and Scotus for them, who makes commandments for them, and who in a council decides for them.
The title of theologian is so great that the fathers of the Council of Trent give it to their cooks, "_cuoco celeste, gran theologo_." Their science is the first of sciences, their condition the first of conditions, and themselves the first of men; such the empire of true doctrine; so much does reason govern mankind!
When a theologian has become--thanks to his arguments--either prince of the holy Roman Empire, archbishop of Toledo, or one of the seventy princes clothed in red, successors of the humble apostles, then the successors of Galen and Hippocrates are at his service. They were his equals when they studied in the same university; they had the same degrees, and received the same furred bonnet. Fortune changes all; and those who discovered the circulation of the blood, the lacteal veins, and the thoracic canal, are the servants of those who have learned what concomitant grace is, and have forgotten it.
SECTION II.
I knew a true theologian; he was master of the languages of the East, and was instructed as much as possible in the ancient rites of nations.
The Brahmins, Chaldæans, Fire-worshippers, Sabeans, Syrians, and Egyptians, were as well known to him as the Jews; the several lessons of the Bible were familiar to him; and for thirty years he had tried to reconcile the gospels, and endeavored to make the fathers agree. He sought in what time precisely the creed attributed to the apostles was digested, and that which bears the name of Athanasius; how the sacraments were instituted one after the other; what was the difference between synaxis and mass; how the Christian Church was divided since its origin into different parties, and how the predominating society treated all the others as heretics. He sounded the depth of policy which always mixes with these quarrels; and he distinguished between policy and wisdom, between the pride which would subjugate minds and the desire of self-illumination, between zeal and fanaticism.
The difficulty of arranging in his head so many things, the nature of which is to be confounded, and of throwing a little light on so many clouds, often checked him; but as these researches were the duty of his profession, he gave himself up to them notwithstanding his distaste. He at length arrived at knowledge unknown to the greater part of his brethren: but the more learned he waxed, the more mistrustful he became of all that he knew. While he lived he was indulgent; and at his death, he confessed that he had spent his life uselessly.
THUNDER.
SECTION I.
_Vidi et crudeles dantem Salmonea pœnas_ _Dum flammas Jovis et sonitus imitatur Olympia, etc._ Salmoneus suffering cruel pains I found, For imitating Jove, the rattling sound Of mimic thunder, and the glittering blaze Of pointed lightnings and their forked rays.
Those who invented and perfected artillery are so many other Salmoneuses. A cannon-ball of twenty-four pounds can make, and has often made, more ravage than an hundred thunder-claps; yet no cannoneer has ever been struck by Jupiter for imitating that which passes in the atmosphere.
We have seen that Polyphemus, in a piece of Euripides, boasts of making more noise, when he had supped well, than the thunder of Jupiter.
Boileau, more honest than Polyphemus, says that another world astonishes him, and that he believes in the immortality of the soul, and that it is God who thunders: _Pour moi, qu'en santé même un autre monde étonne,_ _Qui crois l'âme immortelle, et que c'est Dieu qui tonne._ I know not why he is so astonished at another world, since all antiquity believed in it. Astonish was not the proper word; it was alarm. He believes that it is God who thunders; but he thunders only as he hails, as he rains, and as he produces fine weather--as he operates all, as he performs all. It is not because he is angry that he sends thunder and rain. The ancients paint Jupiter taking thunder, composed of three burning arrows, and hurling it at whomsoever he chose. Sound reason does not agree with these poetical ideas.
Thunder is like everything else, the necessary effect of the laws of nature, prescribed by its author. It is merely a great electrical phenomenon. Franklin forces it to descend tranquilly on the earth; it fell on Professor Richmann as on rocks and churches; and if it struck Ajax Oileus, it was assuredly not because Minerva was irritated against him.
If it had fallen on Cartouche, or the abbé Desfontaines, people would not have failed to say: "Behold how God punishes thieves and--." But it is a useful prejudice to make the sky fearful to the perverse. Thus all our tragic poets, when they would rhyme to "_poudre_" or "_resoudre_," invariably make use of "_foudre_"; and uniformly make "_tonnerre_" roll, when they would rhyme to "_terre_."
Theseus, in "_Phèdre_," says to his son--act iv, scene 2: _Monstre, qu'à trop longtemps épargné le tonnerre,_ _Reste impur des brigands dont j'ai purgé la terre!_ Severus, in "_Polyeucte_," without even having occasion to rhyme, when he learns that his mistress is married, talks to Fabian, his friend, of a clap of thunder. He says elsewhere to the same Fabian--act iv, scene 6--that a new clap of "_foudre_" strikes upon his hope, and reduces it to "_poudre_": _Qu'est ceci, Fabian, quel nouveau coup de foudre_ _Tombe sur mon espoir, et le réduit en poudre?_ A hope reduced to powder must astonish the pit! Lusignan, in "_Zaïre_," prays God that the thunder will burst on him alone: _Que la foudre en éclats ne tombe que sur moi._ If Tydeus consults the gods in the cave of a temple, the cave answers him only by great claps of thunder.
I've finally seen the thunder and "foudre" Reduce verses to cinders and rhymes into "poudre."
We must endeavor to thunder less frequently.
I could never clearly comprehend the fable of Jupiter and Thunder, in La Fontaine--b. viii, fable 20.
_Vulcain remplit ses fourneaux_ _De deux sortes de carreaux._ _L'un jamais ne se fourvoie,_ _L'Olympe en corps nous envoie._ _Bien souvent même il se perd;_ _Et ce dernier en sa route_ _Nous vient du seul Jupiter._ "Vulcan fills his furnaces with two sorts of thunderbolts. The one never wanders, and it is that which comes direct from Olympus. The other diverges in its route, and only spends itself on mountains; it is often even altogether dissipated. It is this last alone which proceeds from Jupiter."
Was the subject of this fable, which La Fontaine put into bad verse so different from his general style, given to him? Would it infer that the ministers of Louis XIV. were inflexible, and that the king pardoned?
Crébillon, in his academical discourse in foreign verse, says that Cardinal Fleury is a wise depositary, the eagle, using his thunder, yet the friend of peace: _Usant en citoyen du pouvoir arbitraire,_ _Aigle de Jupiter, mais ami de la paix,_ _Il gouverne la foudre, et ne tonne jamais._ He says that Marshal Villars made it appear that he survived Malplaquet only to become more celebrated at Denain, and that with a clap of thunder Prince Eugene was vanquished: _Que pour rendre à Denain sa valeur plus célèbre_ _Et qu'un foudre du moins Eugène était vaincu._ Thus the eagle Fleury governed thunder without thundering, and Eugene was vanquished by thunder. Here is quite enough of thunder.
SECTION II.
Horace, sometimes the debauched and sometimes the moral, has said--book i, ode 3--that our folly extends to heaven itself: "_Cœlum ipsum petimus stultitia._" We can say at present that we carry our wisdom to heaven, if we may be permitted to call that blue and white mass of exhalations which causes winds, rain, snow, hail, and thunder, heaven. We have decomposed the thunderbolt, as Newton disentangled light. We have perceived that these thunderbolts, formerly borne by the eagle of Jupiter, are really only electric fire; that in short we can draw down thunder, conduct it, divide it, and render ourselves masters of it, as we make the rays of light pass through a prism, as we give course to the waters which fall from heaven, that is to say, from the height of half a league from our atmosphere. We plant a high fir with the branches lopped off, the top of which is covered with a cone of iron. The clouds which form thunder are electrical; their electricity is communicated to this cone, and a brass wire which is attached to it conducts the matter of thunder wherever we please. An ingenious physician calls this experiment the inoculation of thunder.
It is true, that inoculation for the smallpox, which has preserved so many mortals, caused some to perish, to whom the smallpox had been inconsiderately given; and in like manner the inoculation of thunder ill-performed would be dangerous. There are great lords whom we can only approach with the greatest precaution, and thunder is of this number. We know that the mathematical professor Richmann was killed at St.
Petersburg, in 1753, by a thunderbolt which he had drawn into his chamber: "_Arte sua periit._" As he was a philosopher, a theological professor failed not to publish that he had been thunderstruck like Salmoneus, for having usurped the rights of God, and for wishing to hurl the thunder: but if the physician had directed the brass wire outside the house, and not into his pent-up chamber, he would not have shared the lot of Salmoneus, Ajax Oileus, the emperor Carus, the son of a French minister of state, and of several monks in the Pyrenees.
TOLERATION.
SECTION I.
What is toleration? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies--it is the first law of nature.
When, on the exchange of Amsterdam, of London, of Surat, or of Bassora, the Gueber, the Banian, the Jew, the Mahometan, the Chinese Deist, the Brahmin, the Christian of the Greek Church, the Roman Catholic Christian, the Protestant Christian, and the Quaker Christian, traffic together, they do not lift the poniard against each other, in order to gain souls for their religion. Why then have we been cutting one another's throats almost without interruption since the first Council of Nice?
Constantine began by issuing an edict which allowed all religions, and ended by persecuting. Before him, tumults were excited against the Christians, only because they began to make a party in the state. The Romans permitted all kinds of worship, even those of the Jews, and of the Egyptians, for whom they had so much contempt. Why did Rome tolerate these religions? Because neither the Egyptians, nor even the Jews, aimed at exterminating the ancient religion of the empire, or ranged through land and sea for proselytes; they thought only of money-getting; but it is undeniable, that the Christians wished their own religion to be the dominant one. The Jews would not suffer the statue of Jupiter at Jerusalem, but the Christians wished it not to be in the capitol. St.
Thomas had the candor to avow, that if the Christians did not dethrone the emperors, it was because they could not. Their opinion was, that the whole earth ought to be Christian. They were therefore necessarily enemies to the whole earth, until it was converted.
Among themselves, they were the enemies of each other on all their points of controversy. Was it first of all necessary to regard Jesus Christ as God? Those who denied it were anathematized under the name of Ebionites, who themselves anathematized the adorers of Jesus.
Did some among them wish all things to be in common, as it is pretended they were in the time of the apostles? Their adversaries called them Nicolaites, and accused them of the most infamous crimes. Did others profess a mystical devotion? They were termed Gnostics, and attacked with fury. Did Marcion dispute on the Trinity? He was treated as an idolater.
Tertullian, Praxeas, Origen, Novatus, Novatian, Sabellius, Donatus, were all persecuted by their brethren, before Constantine; and scarcely had Constantine made the Christian religion the ruling one, when the Athanasians and the Eusebians tore each other to pieces; and from that time to our own days, the Christian Church has been deluged with blood.
The Jewish people were, I confess, a very barbarous nation. They mercilessly cut the throats of all the inhabitants of an unfortunate little country upon which they had no more claim than they had upon Paris or London. However, when Naaman was cured of the leprosy by being plunged seven times in the Jordan--when, in order to testify his gratitude to Elisha, who had taught him the secret, he told him he would adore the god of the Jews from gratitude, he reserved to himself the liberty to adore also the god of his own king; he asked Elisha's permission to do so, and the prophet did not hesitate to grant it. The Jews adored their god, but they were never astonished that every nation had its own. They approved of Chemos having given a certain district to the Moabites, provided their god would give them one also. Jacob did not hesitate to marry the daughters of an idolater. Laban had his god, as Jacob had his. Such are the examples of toleration among the most intolerant and cruel people of antiquity. We have imitated them in their absurd passions, and not in their indulgence.
It is clear that every private individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. This admits of no difficulty. But the government, the magistrates, the princes!--how do they conduct themselves towards those who have a faith different from their own? If they are powerful foreigners, it is certain that a prince will form an alliance with them. The Most Christian Francis I. will league himself with the Mussulmans against the Most Catholic Charles V. Francis I. will give money to the Lutherans in Germany, to support them in their rebellion against their emperor; but he will commence, as usual, by having the Lutherans in his own country burned. He pays them in Saxony from policy; he burns them in Paris from policy. But what follows? Persecutions make proselytes. France will soon be filled with new Protestants. At first they will submit to be hanged; afterwards they will hang in their turn. There will be civil wars; then Saint Bartholomew will come; and this corner of the world will be worse than all that the ancients and moderns have ever said of hell.
Blockheads, who have never been able to render a pure worship to the God who made you! Wretches, whom the example of the Noachides, the Chinese literati, the Parsees, and of all the wise, has not availed to guide!
Monsters, who need superstitions, just as the gizzard of a raven needs carrion! We have already told you--and we have nothing else to say--if you have two religions among you, they will massacre each other; if you have thirty, they will live in peace. Look at the Grand Turk: he governs Guebers, Banians, Christians of the Greek Church, Nestorians, and Roman Catholics. The first who would excite a tumult is empaled; and all is tranquil.
SECTION II.
Of all religions, the Christian ought doubtless to inspire the most