heaven are
obviously those of its ministers; whence it evidently follows, that in
every religion, priests, under pretext of the interests of heaven or the
glory of God, can dispense with the duties of human Morality, when they
clash with the duties, which God has a right to impose. Besides, must
not he, who has power to pardon crimes, have a right to encourage the
commission of crimes?

171.

We are perpetually told, that, without a God there would be no _moral
obligation_; that the people and even the sovereigns require a legislator
powerful enough to constrain them. Moral constraint supposes a law; but
this law arises from the eternal and necessary relations of things with
one another; relations, which have nothing common with the existence of a
God. The rules of Man's conduct are derived from his own nature which he
is capable of knowing, and not from the Divine nature of which he has no
idea. These rules constrain or oblige us; that is, we render ourselves
estimable or contemptible, amiable or detestable, worthy of reward or of
punishment, happy or unhappy, accordingly as we conform to, or deviate
from these rules. The law, which obliges man not to hurt himself, is
founded upon the nature of a sensible being, who, in whatever way he came
into this world, is forced by his actual essence to seek good and shun
evil, to love pleasure and fear pain. The law, which obliges man not
to injure, and even to do good to others, is founded upon the nature of
sensible beings, living in society, whose essence compels them to despise
those who are useless, and to detest those who oppose their felicity.

Whether there exists a God or not, whether this God has spoken or not, the
moral duties of men will be always the same, so long as they are sensible
beings. Have men then need of a God whom they know not, of an invisible
legislator, of a mysterious religion and of chimerical fears, in order to
learn that every excess evidently tends to destroy them, that to preserve
health they must be temperate; that to gain the love of others it is
necessary to do them good, that to do them evil is a sure means to incur
their vengeance and hatred? "Before the law there was no sin." Nothing is
more false than this maxim. It suffices that man is what he is, or that
he is a sensible being, in order to distinguish what gives him pleasure or
displeasure. It suffices that one man knows that another man is a sensible
being like himself, to percei