improvement of the public morals,
and a partial release from oppression; but, other than that, the SEEDS
SOWN BY THE SON OF MAN, having fallen into idolatrous hearts, had
produced nothing save innumerable discords and a quasi-poetical
mythology. Instead of developing into their practical consequences the
principles of morality and government taught by The Word of God, his
followers busied themselves in speculations as to his birth, his origin,
his person, and his actions; they discussed his parables, and from the
conflict of the most extravagant opinions upon unanswerable questions
and texts which no one understood, was born THEOLOGY,--which may be
defined as the SCIENCE OF THE INFINITELY ABSURD.

The truth of CHRISTIANITY did not survive the age of the apostles; the
GOSPEL, commented upon and symbolized by the Greeks and Latins, loaded
with pagan fables, became literally a mass of contradictions; and to
this day the reign of the INFALLIBLE CHURCH has been a long era of
darkness. It is said that the GATES OF HELL will not always prevail,
that THE WORD OF GOD will return, and that one day men will know truth
and justice; but that will be the death of Greek and Roman Catholicism,
just as in the light of science disappeared the caprices of opinion.

The monsters which the successors of the apostles were bent on
destroying, frightened for a moment, reappeared gradually, thanks to the
crazy fanaticism, and sometimes the deliberate connivance, of priests
and theologians. The history of the enfranchisement of the French
communes offers constantly the spectacle of the ideas of justice and
liberty spreading among the people, in spite of the combined efforts of
kings, nobles, and clergy. In the year 1789 of the Christian era, the
French nation, divided by caste, poor and oppressed, struggled in the
triple net of royal absolutism, the tyranny of nobles and parliaments,
and priestly intolerance. There was the right of the king and the right
of the priest, the right of the patrician and the right of the plebeian;
there were the privileges of birth, province, communes, corporations,
and trades; and, at the bottom of all, violence, immorality, and misery.
For some time they talked of reformation; those who apparently desired
it most favoring it only for their own profit, and the people who were
to be the gainers expecting little and saying nothing. For a long
time these poor people, either from distrust, incredulity, or despair,
hes