ociety. Such is the true spirit of your
doctrines. Your gospels in their precepts and their parables, never
represent God but as a despot without any rules of equity; a partial
father treating a debauched and prodigal son with more favor than his
respectful and virtuous children; a capricious master, who gives the
same wages to workmen who had wrought but one hour, as to those who had
labored through the whole day; one who prefers the last comers to the
first. The moral is everywhere misanthropic and antisocial; it disgusts
men with life and with society; and tends only to encourage hermitism
and celibacy.

* The equality of mankind in a state of nature and in the
eyes of God was one of the principal tenets of the
Samaneans, and they appear to be the only ancients that
entertained this opinion.

"As to the manner in which you have practised these morals, we appeal
in our turn to the testimony of facts. We ask whether it is this
evangelical meekness which has excited your interminable wars between
your sects, your atrocious persecutions of pretended heretics, your
crusades against Arianism, Manicheism, Protestantism, without speaking
of your crusades against us, and of those sacrilegious associations,
still subsisting, of men who take an oath to continue them?* We ask
you whether it be gospel charity which has made you exterminate whole
nations in America, to annihilate the empires of Mexico and Peru; which
makes you continue to dispeople Africa and sell its inhabitants like
cattle, notwithstanding your abolition of slavery; which makes you
ravage India and usurp its dominions; and whether it be the same charity
which, for three centuries past, has led you to harrass the habitations
of the people of three continents, of whom the most prudent, the Chinese
and Japanese, were constrained to drive you off, that they might escape
your chains and recover their internal peace?"

* The oath taken by the knights of the Order of Malta, is to
kill, or make the Mahometans prisoners, for the glory of
God.

Here the Bramins, the Rabbins, the Bonzes, the Chamans, the Priests of
the Molucca islands, and the coasts of Guinea, loading the Christian
doctors with reproaches: "Yes!" cried they, "these men are robbers and
hypocrites, who preach simplicity, to surprise confidence; humility,
to enslave with more ease; poverty, to appropriate all riches to
themselves. They promise another world, the better