vinity,
are they not visibly borrowed from the implacable, jealous, vindictive,
blood-thirsty, capricious, inconsiderate humor of man, who has not yet
cultivated his reason? Oh, men! you worship but a great savage, whom you
consider as a model to follow, as an amiable master, as a perfect
sovereign.

The religious opinions of men in every country are antique and durable
monuments of ignorance credulity, of the terrors and the ferocity of
their ancestors. Every barbarian is a child thirsting for the wonderful,
which he imbibes with pleasure, and who never reasons upon that which he
finds proper to excite his imagination; his ignorance of the ways of
nature makes him attribute to spirits, to enchantments, to magic, all
that appears to him extraordinary; in his eyes his priests are
sorcerers, in whom he supposes an Almighty power; before whom his
confused reason humiliates itself, whose oracles are for him infallible
decrees, to contradict which would be dangerous. In matters of religion
the majority of men have remained in their primitive barbarity. Modern
religions are but follies of old times rejuvenated or presented in some
new form. If the ancient barbarians have worshiped mountains, rivers,
serpents, trees, fetishes of every kind; if the wise Egyptians worshiped
crocodiles, rats, onions, do we not see nations who believe themselves
wiser than they, worship with reverence a bread, into which they imagine
that the enchantments of their priests cause the Divinity to descend? Is
not the God-bread the fetish of many Christian nations, as little
rational in this point as that of the most barbarous nations?

CXXI.--ALL RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES BEAR THE SEAL OF STUPIDITY OR BARBARITY.

In all times the ferocity, the stupidity, the folly of savage men were
shown in religious customs which were often cruel and extravagant. A
spirit of barbarity has come down to our days; it intrudes itself into
the religions which are followed by the most civilized nations. Do we
not still see human victims offered to Divinity? In order to appease the
wrath of a God whom we suppose as ferocious, as jealous, as vindictive,
as a savage, do not sanguinary laws cause the destruction of those who
are believed to have displeased Him by their way of thinking?

Modern nations, at the instigation of their priests, have even excelled
the atrocious folly of the most barbarous nations; at least do we not
find that it never entered into a savage's min