lties, would only give them for their conduct a light too weak
to find their way, and to avoid the continual dangers by which they
are surrounded? Should you consider that the father had adequately
provided for their security by giving them in writing unintelligible
instructions, which they could not decipher by the weak light he had
given them?

Our spiritual directors will not fail to tell us that the corruption
of reason and the weakness of the human understanding are the
consequences of sin. But why has man become sinful? How has the good
God permitted his dear children, for whom he created the universe, and
of whom he exacts obedience, to offend him, and thereby extinguish,
or, at least, weaken the light he had given them? On the other hand,
the reason of Adam ought to be, without doubt, completely perfect
before his fall. In this case, why did it not prevent that fall and
its consequences? Was the reason of Adam corrupted even beforehand by
incurring the wrath of his God? Was it depraved before he had done any
thing to deprave it?

To justify this strange conduct of Providence, to clear him from
passing as the author of sin, to save him the ridicule of being the
cause or the accomplice of offences which he did against himself, the
theologians have imagined a _being_ subordinate to the divine power.
It is the secondary being they make the author of all the evil which
is committed in the universe. In the impossibility of reconciling the
continual disorders of which the world is the theatre with the
purposes of a Deity replete with goodness, the Creator and Preserver
of the universe, who delights in order, and who seeks only the
happiness of his creatures, they have trumped up a destructive genius,
imbued with wickedness, who conspires to render men miserable, and to
overthrow the beneficent views of the Eternal. This bad and perverse
being they call _Satan_, the _Devil_, the _Evil One_; and we see him
play a great game in all the religions of the world, the founders of
which have found in the impotence of Deity the sources of both good
and evil. By the aid of this imaginary being they have been enabled to
resolve all their difficulties; yet they could not foresee that this
invention, which went to annihilate or abridge the power of Deity, was
a system filled with palpable contradictions, and that if the Devil
were really the author of sin, it would be he, in all justice, who
ought to undergo all its punishment.