hat the devil is at least as useful as God to the ministers
of religion. They have too much interest in their dissensions, to be
instrumental in an accommodation between two enemies, upon whose combats
their own existence and revenues depend. Let men cease to be tempted
and to sin, and the ministry of priests will be useless. Manicheism is
evidently the hinge of every religion; but unhappily, the devil, invented
to clear the deity from the suspicion of malice, proves to us, every
moment, the impotence or unskilfulness of his celestial adversary.

76.

The nature of man, it is said, was necessarily liable to corruption. God
could not communicate to him _impeccability_, which is an inalienable
attribute of his divine perfection. But if God could not make man
impeccable, why did he give himself the pains to make man, whose nature
must necessarily be corrupted, and who must consequently offend God? On
the other hand, if God himself could not make human nature impeccable, by
what right does he punish men for not being impeccable? It can be only
by the right of the strongest; but the right of the strongest is called
violence, and violence cannot be compatible with the justest of beings.
God would be supremely unjust, should he punish men for not sharing with
him his divine perfections, or for not being able to be gods like him.

Could not God, at least, have communicated to all men that kind of
perfection, of which their nature is susceptible? If some men are good,
or render themselves agreeable to their God, why has not that God done the
same favour, or given the same dispositions to all beings of our species?
Why does the number of the wicked so much exceed the number of the good?
Why, for one friend, has God ten thousand enemies, in a world, which it
depended entirely upon him to people with honest men? If it be true, that,
in heaven, God designs to form a court of saints, of elect, or of men who
shall have lived upon earth conformably to his views, would he not have
had a more numerous, brilliant, and honourable assembly, had he composed
it of all men, to whom, in creating them, he could grant the degree of
goodness, necessary to attain eternal happiness? Finally, would it not
have been shorter not to have made man, than to have created him a being
full of faults, rebellious to his creator, perpetually exposed to cause
his own destruction by a fatal abuse of his liberty?

Instead of creating men, a perfect God oug