cts prayers, offerings, and sacrifices;
that he requires, in order to be appeased, that his ministers should
receive more consideration, should be heard more attentively, and
should be more enriched. Without this, they announce to the vulgar
that their harvests will fail, that their fields will be inundated,
that pestilence, famine, war, and contagion will visit the earth; and
when these misfortunes have arrived, they declare they may be removed
by means of prayers.

If fear and terror permitted men to reason, they would discover that
all the evils, as well as the good things of this life, are necessary
consequences of the order of nature. They would perceive that a wise
God, immutable in his conduct, cannot allow any thing to transpire but
according to those laws of which he is regarded as the author. They
would discover that the calamities, sterility, maladies, contagions,
and even death itself are effects as necessary as happiness,
abundance, health, and life itself. They would find that wars, wants,
and famine are often the effects of human imprudence; that they would
submit to accidents which they could not prevent, and guard against
those they could foresee; they would remedy by simple and natural
means those against which they possessed resources; and they would
undeceive themselves in regard to those supernatural means and those
useless prayers of which the experience of so many ages ought to have
disabused men, if they were capable of correcting their religious
prejudices.

This would not, indeed, redound to the advantage of the priests, since
they would become useless if men perceived the inefficacy of their
prayers, the futility of their practices, and the absence of all
rational foundation for those exercises of piety which place the human
race upon their knees. They compel their votaries always to run down
those who discredit their pretensions. They terrify the weak minded by
frightful ideas which they hold out to them of the Deity. They forbid
them to reason; they make them deaf to reason, by conforming them to
ordinances the most out of the way, the most unreasonable, and the
most contradictory to the very principles on which they pretend to
establish them. They change practices, arbitrary in themselves, or, at
most, indifferent and useless, into important duties, which they
proclaim the most essential of all duties, and the most sacred and
moral. They know that man ceases to reason in proportion as he