s from society to pass the remainder of their lives
in unhappiness. The society of these devotees is calculated solely to
render their lives mutually more unsupportable. But it seems strange
that men should expect to merit heaven by suffering the torments of
hell on earth; yet so it is, and reason has too often proved
insufficient to convince them of the contrary.

If this religion does not call all Christians to these sublime
perfections, it nevertheless enjoins on all its votaries suffering and
mortifying of the body. The church prescribes privations to all her
children, and abstinences and fasts; these things they practise among
us as duties; and the devotees imagine they render themselves very
agreeable to the Divinity when they have scrupulously fulfilled those
minute and puerile practices, by which they tell us that the priests
have proof whether their patience and obedience be such as are
dictated by and acceptable to Heaven. What a ridiculous idea is it,
for example, to make of the Deity a trio of persons; to teach the
faithful that this Deity takes notice of what kinds of food his people
eat; that he is displeased if they eat beef or mutton, but that he is
delighted if they eat beans and fish! In good sooth, Madam, our
priests, who sometimes give us very lofty ideas of God, please
themselves but too often with making him strangely contemptible!

The life of a good Christian or of a devotee is crowded with a host of
useless practices, which would be at least pardonable if they procured
any good for society. But it is not for that purpose that our priests
make so much ado about them; they only wish to have submissive slaves,
sufficiently blind to respect their caprices as the orders of a wise
God; sufficiently stupid to regard all their practices as divine
duties, and they who scrupulously observe them as the real favorites
of the Omnipotent. What good can there result to the world from the
abstinence of meats, so much enjoined on some Christians, especially
when other Christians judge this injunction a very ridiculous law, and
contrary to reason and the order of things established in nature? It
is not difficult to perceive amongst us that this injunction, openly
violated by the rich, is an oppression on the poor, who are compelled
to pay dearly for an indifferent, often an unwholesome diet, that
injures rather than repairs the natural strength of their
constitution. Besides, do not the priests sell this permiss