his children murdering one another? Ye victors! with what eye
should he view your hands reeking in the blood he hath created? And,
what do you expect, oh vanquished, from useless groans? Hath God
the heart of a mortal, with passions ever changing? Is he, like you,
agitated with vengeance or compassion, with wrath or repentance? What
base conception of the most sublime of beings! According to them, it
would seem, that God whimsical and capricious, is angered or appeased as
a man: that he loves and hates alternately; that he punishes or favors;
that, weak or wicked, he broods over his hatred; that, contradictory
or perfidious, he lays snares to entrap; that he punishes the evils he
permits; that he foresees but hinders not crimes; that, like a corrupt
judge, he is bribed by offerings; like an ignorant despot, he makes
laws and revokes them; that, like a savage tyrant, he grants or resumes
favors without reason, and can only be appeased by servility. Ah! now
I know the lying spirit of man! Contemplating the picture which he hath
drawn of the Divinity: No, said I, it is not God who hath made man after
the image of God; but man hath made God after the image of man; he hath
given him his own mind, clothed him with his own propensities;
ascribed to him his own judgments. And when in this medley he finds
the contradiction of his own principles, with hypocritical humility,
he imputes weakness to his reason, and names the absurdities of his own
mind the mysteries of God.

He hath said, God is immutable, yet he offers prayers to change him;
he hath pronounced him incomprehensible, yet he interprets him without
ceasing.

Imposters have arisen on the earth who have called themselves the
confidants of God; and, erecting themselves into teachers of the people,
have opened the ways of falsehood and iniquity; they have ascribed merit
to practices indifferent or ridiculous; they have supposed a virtue,
in certain postures, in pronouncing certain words, articulating certain
names; they have transformed into a crime the eating of certain meats,
the drinking of certain liquors, on one day rather than another. The
Jew would rather die than labor on the sabbath; the Persian would endure
suffocation, before he would blow the fire with his breath; the Indian
places supreme perfection in besmearing himself with cow-dung, and
pronouncing mysteriously the word Aum;* the Mussulman believes he has
expiated everything in washing his head and arms; a