hose who take upon themselves the
responsibility of conducting mankind thither.

CVIII.--IT IS FALSE THAT THE DOGMA OF ANOTHER LIFE CAN BE CONSOLING; AND
IF IT WERE, IT WOULD BE NO PROOF THAT THIS ASSERTION IS TRUE.

But, it will be said, is not the dogma of the immortality of the soul
consoling for beings who often find themselves very unhappy here below?
If this should be an illusion, is it not a sweet and agreeable one? Is
it not a benefit for man to believe that he can live again and enjoy,
sometime, the happiness which is refused to him on earth? Thus, poor
mortals! you make your wishes the measure of the truth! Because you
desire to live forever, and to be happier, you conclude from thence that
you will live forever, and that you will be more fortunate in an unknown
world than in the known world, in which you so often suffer! Consent,
then, to leave without regret this world, which causes more trouble than
pleasure to the majority of you. Resign yourselves to the order of
destiny, which decrees that you, like all other beings, should not
endure forever. But what will become of me? you ask! What you were
several millions of years ago. You were then, I do not know what; resign
yourselves, then, to become again in an instant, I do not know what;
what you were then; return peaceably to the universal home from which
you came without your knowledge into your material form, and pass by
without murmuring, like all the beings which surround you!

We are repeatedly told that religious ideas offer infinite consolation
to the unfortunate; it is pretended that the idea of the immortality of
the soul and of a happier life has a tendency to lift up the heart of
man and to sustain him in the midst of the adversities with which he is
assailed in this life. Materialism, on the contrary, is, we are told, an
afflicting system, tending to degrade man, which ranks him among brutes;
which destroys his courage, whose only hope is complete annihilation,
tending to lead him to despair, and inducing him to commit suicide as
soon as he suffers in this world. The grand policy of theologians is to
blow hot and to blow cold, to afflict and to console, to frighten and to
reassure.

According to the fictions of theology, the regions of the other life are
happy and unhappy. Nothing more difficult than to render one worthy of
the abode of felicity; nothing easier than to obtain a place in the
abode of torments that Divinity prepares for th