erior to my
strength restrained me and forced me to silence until my death."

The abbot Meslier had written two letters to the curates of his
neighborhood to inform them of his Testament; he told them that he had
consigned to the chancery of St. Minnehould a copy of his manuscript in
366 leaves in octavo; but he feared it would be suppressed, according to
the bad custom established to prevent the poor from being instructed and
knowing the truth.

The curate Meslier, the most singular phenomenon ever seen among all the
meteors fatal to the Christian religion, worked his whole life secretly
in order to attack the opinions he believed false. To compose his
manuscript against God, against all religion, against the Bible and the
Church, he had no other assistance than the Bible itself, Moreri
Montaigne, and a few fathers.

While the abbot Meslier naively acknowledged that he did not wish to be
burned till after his death, Thomas Woolston, a doctor of Cambridge,
published and sold publicly at London, in his own house, sixty thousand
copies of his "Discourses" against the miracles of Jesus Christ.

It was a very astonishing thing that two priests should at the same time
write against the Christian religion. The curate Meslier has gone
further yet than Woolston; he dares to treat the transport of our
Saviour by the devil upon the mountain, the wedding of Cana, the bread
and the fishes, as absurd fables, injurious to divinity, which were
ignored during three hundred years by the whole Roman Empire, and
finally passed from the lower class to the palace of the emperors, when
policy obliged them to adopt the follies of the people in order the more
easily to subjugate them. The denunciations of the English priest do not
approach those of the Champagne priest. Woolston is sometimes indulgent,
Meslier never. He was a man profoundly embittered by the crimes he
witnessed, for which he holds the Christian religion responsible. There
is no miracle which to him is not an object of contempt and horror; no
prophecy that he does not compare to those of Nostredamus. He wrote thus
against Jesus Christ when in the arms of death, at a time when the most
dissimulating dare not lie, and when the most intrepid tremble. Struck
with the difficulties which he found in Scripture, he inveighed against
it more bitterly than the Acosta and all the Jews, more than the famous
Porphyre, Celse, Iamblique, Julian, Libanius, and all the partisans of
human re