es of perverse rulers, continually crushed under
the iron sceptre of a succession of merciless tyrants, annihilated by the
scourges of a bad government, whose destructive effects are often felt for
ages? If chastisements are good, then they cannot have too much of a good
thing! _The eyes of faith_ must be strange eyes, if with them they see
advantages in the most dreadful calamities, in the vices and follies with
which our species are afflicted.

90.

What strange ideas of divine justice must Christians have, who are taught
to believe, that their God, in view of reconciling to himself the human
race, guilty, though unconscious, of the sin of their fathers, has put to
death his own son, who was innocent and incapable of sinning? What should
we say of a king, whose subjects should revolt, and who, to appease
himself, should find no other expedient than to put to death the heir of
his crown, who had not participated in the general rebellion? "It is,"
the Christian will say, "through goodness to his subjects, unable of
themselves to satisfy divine justice, that God has consented to the cruel
death of his son." But the goodness of a father to strangers does not
give him the right of being unjust and barbarous to his own son. All
the qualities, which theology ascribes to God, reciprocally destroy one
another. The exercise of one of his perfections is always at the expense
of the exercise of another.

Has the Jew more rational ideas of divine justice than the Christian?
The pride of a king kindles the anger of heaven; _Jehovah_ causes the
pestilence to descend upon his innocent people; seventy thousand subjects
are exterminated to expiate the fault of a monarch, whom the goodness of
God resolved to spare.

91.

Notwithstanding the various acts of injustice, with which all religions
delight to blacken the Divinity, men cannot consent to accuse him of
iniquity. They fear, that, like the tyrants of this world, truth will
offend him, and redouble upon them the weight of his malice and tyranny.
They hearken therefore to their priests, who tell them, that their God
is a tender father; that this God is an equitable monarch whose object in
this world is to assure himself of the love, obedience and respect of
his subjects; who gives them liberty of acting only to afford them
an opportunity of meriting his favours, and of acquiring an eternal
happiness, which he does not owe them. By what signs can men discover
the ten