attention. The only ideas we can form of him are so devoid of object, and
are at the same time so afflicting, that the only imaginations they can
arrest are those of melancholy hypochondriacs, who do not constitute the
majority of the inhabitants of this world. The vulgar have no conception
of God; their weak brains are confused, whenever they think of him.
The man of business thinks only of his business; the courtier of his
intrigues; men of fashion, women, and young people of their pleasures;
dissipation soon effaces in them all the fatiguing notions of Religion.
The ambitious man, the miser and the debauchee carefully avoid
speculations too feeble to counterbalance their various passions.

Who is awed by the idea of a God? A few enfeebled men, morose and
disgusted with the world; a few, in whom the passions are already deadened
by age, by infirmity, or by the strokes of fortune. Religion is a check,
to those alone who by their state of mind and body, or by fortuitous
circumstances, have been already brought to reason. The fear of God
hinders from sin only those, who are not much inclined to it, or else
those who are no longer able to commit it. To tell men, that the
Deity punishes crimes in this world, is to advance an assertion, which
experience every moment contradicts. The worst of men are commonly the
arbiters of the world, and are those whom fortune loads with her favours.
To refer us to another life, in order to convince us of the judgments
of God, is to refer us to conjectures, in order to destroy facts, which
cannot be doubted.

167.

Nobody thinks of the life to come, when he is strongly smitten with
the objects he finds here below. In the eyes of a passionate lover, the
presence of his mistress extinguishes the flames of hell, and her charms
efface all the pleasures of paradise. Woman! you leave, say you, your
lover for your God. This is either because your lover is no longer the
same in your eyes, or because he leaves you.

Nothing is more common, than to see ambitious, perverse, corrupt, and
immoral men, who have some ideas of Religion, and sometimes appear even
zealous for its interest. If they do not practise it at present, they hope
to in the future. They lay it up, as a remedy, which will be necessary
to salve the conscience for the evil they intend to commit. Besides, the
party of devotees and priests being very numerous, active, and powerful,
is it not astonishing, that rogues and knaves s