FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   230   231   232   233   234   235   236   237   238   239   240   241   242   243   244   245   246   247   248   >>  
servility, and ignorance. If, as is the fact, our own experience and that of others daily teaches us that what at one time appeared true, afterwards appeared demonstrably false, how can we connect with our judgments that blind and presumptuous confidence which pursues those of others with so much hatred? No doubt it is reasonable, and even honest, to act according to our present feelings and conviction: but if these feelings and their causes do vary by the very nature of things, how dare we impose upon ourselves or others an invariable conviction? How, above all, dare we require this conviction in cases where there is really no sensation, as happens in purely speculative questions, in which no palpable fact can be presented? Therefore, when opening the book of nature, (a more authentic one and more easy to be read than leaves of paper blackened over with Greek or Hebrew,) and when I reflected that the slightest change in the material world has not been in times past, nor is at present effected by the difference of so many religions and sects which have appeared and still exist on the globe, and that the course of the seasons, the path of the sun, the return of rain and drought, are the same for the inhabitants of each country, whether Christians, Mussulmans, Idolaters, Catholics, Protestants, etc., I am induced to believe that the universe is governed by laws of wisdom and justice, very different from those which human ignorance and intolerance would enact. And as in living with men of very opposite religious persuasions, I have had occasion to remark that their manners were, nevertheless, very analogous; that is to say, among the different Christian sects, among the Mahometans, and even among those people who were of no sect, I have found men who practise all the virtues, public and private, and that too without affectation; while others, who were incessantly declaiming of God and religion, abandoned themselves to every vicious habit which their belief condemned, I thereby became convinced that Ethics, the doctrines of morality, are the only essential, as they are only demonstrable, part of religion. And as, by your own avowal, the only end of religion is to render men better, in order to add to their happiness, p. 62, I have concluded that there are but two great systems of religion in the world, that of good sense and beneficence, and that of malice and hypocrisy. In closing this letter, I find myself emb
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   230   231   232   233   234   235   236   237   238   239   240   241   242   243   244   245   246   247   248   >>  



Top keywords:

religion

 

conviction

 
appeared
 

feelings

 

present

 

nature

 

ignorance

 

Protestants

 

Christian

 
Mussulmans

public
 

Mahometans

 

people

 
Idolaters
 
analogous
 

practise

 

Catholics

 
virtues
 

persuasions

 
religious

opposite

 
living
 
intolerance
 

justice

 

wisdom

 

manners

 
induced
 

universe

 

remark

 
occasion

governed
 

condemned

 

happiness

 

concluded

 

avowal

 

render

 

systems

 

letter

 

closing

 
hypocrisy

beneficence
 
malice
 

abandoned

 

vicious

 

declaiming

 
incessantly
 

affectation

 

belief

 

morality

 

essential