of the gods or of their ministers. It converts the
art of governing men into a mysterious tyranny, which is the scourge
of nations. It changes princes into unjust, licentious despots, and the
people into ignorant slaves, who become corrupt in order to merit the
favour of their masters.

199.

By tracing the history of the human mind, we shall be easily convinced,
that Theology has cautiously guarded against its progress. It began by
giving out fables as sacred truth: it produced poetry, which filled the
imagination of men with its puerile fictions: it entertained them with its
gods and their incredible deeds. In a word, Religion has always treated
men, like children, whom it lulled to sleep with tales, which its
ministers would have us still regard as incontestable truths.

If the ministers of the gods have sometimes made useful discoveries, they
have always been careful to give them a dogmatical tone, and envelope them
in the shades of mystery. Pythagoras and Plato, in order to acquire some
trifling knowledge, were obliged to court the favour of priests, to be
initiated in their mysteries, and to undergo whatever trials they were
pleased to impose. At this price, they were permitted to imbibe those
exalted notions, still so bewitching to all those who admire only what
is perfectly unintelligible. It was from Egyptian, Indian, and Chaldean
priests, from the schools of these visionaries, professionally interested
in bewildering human reason, that philosophy was obliged to borrow its
first rudiments. Obscure and false in its principles, mixed with fictions
and fables, and made only to dazzle the imagination, the progress of this
philosophy was precarious, and its theories unintelligible; instead of
enlightening, it blighted the mind, and diverted it from objects truly
useful.

The theological speculations and mystical reveries of the ancients are
still law in a great part of the philosophic world; and being adopted by
modern theology, it is heresy to abandon them. They tell us "of aerial
beings, of spirits, angels, demons, genii," and other phantoms, which are
the object of their meditations, and serve as the basis of _metaphysics_,
an abstract and futile science, which for thousands of years the greatest
geniuses have vainly studied. Hypothesis, imagined by a few visionaries
of Memphis and Babylon, constitute even now the foundations of a science,
whose obscurity makes it revered as marvellous and divine.

The