of their species. Let us teach men to
be just, benevolent, moderate, and sociable, not because their Gods
exact it, but to please men; let us tell them to abstain from vice and
from crime, not because they will be punished in another world, but
because they will suffer in the present world. There are, says
Montesquieu, means to prevent crime, they are sufferings; to change the
manners, these are good examples. Truth is simple, error is complicated,
uncertain in its gait, full of by-ways; the voice of nature is
intelligible, that of falsehood is ambiguous, enigmatical, and
mysterious; the road of truth is straight, that of imposture is oblique
and dark; this truth, always necessary to man, is felt by all just
minds; the lessons of reason are followed by all honest souls; men are
unhappy only because they are ignorant; they are ignorant only because
everything conspires to prevent them from being enlightened, and they
are wicked only because their reason is not sufficiently developed.

COMMON SENSE.

Detexit quo dolose Vaticinandi furore sacerdotes mysteria, illis spe
ignota, audactur publicant.--PETRON. SATYR.

I.--APOLOGUE.

There is a vast empire governed by a monarch, whose conduct does but
confound the minds of his subjects. He desires to be known, loved,
respected, and obeyed, but he never shows himself; everything tends to
make uncertain the notions which we are able to form about him. The
people subjected to his power have only such ideas of the character and
the laws of their invisible sovereign as his ministers give them; these
suit, however, because they themselves have no idea of their master, for
his ways are impenetrable, and his views and his qualities are totally
incomprehensible; moreover, his ministers disagree among themselves in
regard to the orders which they pretend emanated from the sovereign
whose organs they claim to be; they announce them diversely in each
province of the empire; they discredit and treat each other as impostors
and liars; the decrees and ordinances which they promulgate are obscure;
they are enigmas, made not to be understood or divined by the subjects
for whose instruction they were intended. The laws of the invisible
monarch need interpreters, but those who explain them are always
quarreling among themselves about the true way of understanding them;
more than this, they do not agree among themselves; all which they
relate of their hidden prince is but a tissue