whom thou
knowest not: but if against his laws thou hast committed crime, remember
that he is easy to appease and of great mercy: go to his temple, humble
thyself at the feet of his ministers, expiate thy misdeeds by
sacrifices, offerings, prayers; these will wash away thy stain in the
eyes of the Eternal.'"

Of course, philosophical criticism would have much to say about this
glowing mass of furious propositions; for the first voice of Nature
hardly whispers into the ear of the primitive man all these high and
generous promptings. But if by Nature we here understand the
Encyclopaedists, and by Religion the Catholic Church in France at that
moment, then Holbach's fiery antitheses are a tolerably fair account of
the matter. And the political side of the indictment was hardly less
just, though its hardihood appalled men like Voltaire.

"Nature says to man, 'Thou art free, and no power on earth can lawfully
strip thee of thy rights:' Religion cries to him that he is a slave
condemned by God to groan under the rod of God's representatives. Nature
bids man to love the country that gave him birth, to serve it with all
loyalty, to bind his interests to hers against every hand that might be
raised upon her: Religion commands him to obey without a murmur the
tyrants that oppress his country, to take their part against her, to
chain his fellow-citizens under their lawless caprices. Yet if the
Sovereign be not devoted enough to his priests, Religion instantly
changes her tone; she incites the subjects to rebellion, she makes
resistance a duty, she cries aloud that we must obey God rather than
man.... If the nature of man were consulted on Politics, which
supernatural ideas have so shamefully depraved, it would contribute far
more than all the religion in the world to make communities happy,
powerful, and prosperous under reasonable authority.... This nature
would teach princes that they are men and not gods; that they are
citizens charged by their fellow-citizens with watching over the safety
of all.... Instead of attributing to the divine vengeance all the wars,
the famines, the plagues that lay nations low, would it not have been
more useful to show them that such calamities are due to the passions,
the indolence, the tyranny of their princes, who sacrifice the nations
to their hideous delirium? Natural evils demand natural remedies; ought
not experience, therefore, long ago to have undeceived mortals as to
those supernatural