t.

If you dispute with Zarathustra, put under lock and key the old and the
new Testaments which he did not know, and which one must revere without
desiring to explain them.

What then should I have said to Zarathustra? My reason cannot admit two
gods who fight, that is good only in a poem where Minerva quarrels with
Mars. My feeble reason is much more content with a single great Being,
whose essence was to make, and who has made all that nature has
permitted Him, than it is satisfied with two great Beings, one of whom
spoils the works of the other. Your bad principle Ahriman, has not been
able to upset a single one of the astronomical and physical laws of the
good principle Ormuzd; everything progresses in the heavens with the
greatest regularity. Why should the wicked Ahriman have had power over
this little globe of the world?

If I had been Ahriman, I should have attacked Ormuzd in his fine grand
provinces of so many suns and stars. I should not have limited myself to
making war on him in a little village.

There is much evil in this village: but whence have you the knowledge
that this evil is not inevitable?

You are forced to admit an intelligence diffused over the universe; but
(1) do you know, for instance, if this power reaches right to foreseeing
the future? You have asserted it a thousand times; but you have never
been able either to prove it, or to understand it. You cannot know how
any being whatever sees what is not. Well, the future is not; therefore
no being can see it. You are reduced to saying that He foresees it; but
foreseeing is conjecturing. This is the opinion of the Socinians.

Well, a God who, according to you, conjectures, can be mistaken. In your
system He is really mistaken; for if He had foreseen that His enemy
would poison all His works here below, He would not have produced them;
He would not have prepared for Himself the shame of being continually
vanquished.

(2) Do I not do Him much more honour by saying that He has made
everything by the necessity of His nature, than you do Him by raising an
enemy who disfigures, who soils, who destroys all His works here below?

(3) It is not to have an unworthy idea of God to say that, having formed
thousands of millions of worlds where death and evil do not dwell, it
was necessary that evil and death should dwell in this world.

(4) It is not to disparage God to say that He could not form man without
giving him self-esteem; that this self-e