n and touching
things, should have been so devoid of historic spirit as to buffet
David, Mahomet, Chrysostom, and other holy personages, as superstitious
brigands. And we may believe that he has certainly been too sweeping in
denying any deterrent efficacy whatever to the fires of hell. But where
Holbach found one person in 1770, he would find a thousand in 1880, to
agree with him, that it is possible to think of commendations and
inducements to virtue, that shall be at least as efficacious as the
fiction of eternal torment, without being as cruel, as wicked, as
infamous to the gods, and as degrading to men.

From his attack on Immortality, Holbach naturally turns with new energy,
as do all who have passed beyond that belief, to the improvement of the
education, the laws, the institutions, which are to strengthen and
implant the true motives for turning men away from wrong and inspiring
them to right. He draws a stern and prolonged indictment against the
kings of the earth, in words that we have already quoted above, as
unjust, incapable, depraved by license and impunity. One passage in this
chapter is the scripture of a terrible prophecy, the very handwriting on
the wall, which was to be so accurately fulfilled almost in the lifetime
of the writer:--"The state of society is now a state of war of the
Sovereign against all, and of each of its members against the other. Man
is bad, not because he was born bad, but because he is made so; the
great and the powerful crush with impunity the needy and the
unfortunate, and these in turn seek to repay all the ill that has been
done to them. They openly or privily attack a native land that is a
cruel stepmother to them; she gives all to some of her children, while
others she strips of all. Sorely they punish her for her partiality;
they show her that the motives borrowed from another life are powerless
against the passions and the bitter wrath engendered by a corrupt
administration in the life here; and that all the terror of the
punishments of this world is impotent against necessity, against
criminal habits, against a dangerous organisation that no education has
ever been applied to correct" (ch. xiv.). In another place: "A society
enjoys all the happiness of which it is susceptible so soon as the
greater number of its members are fed, clothed, housed; are able, in a
word, without an excessive toil, to satisfy the wants that nature has
made necessities to them. Their imaginatio