e same time, acknowledge it is impossible for us to form any ideas?

It thus appears that hope and faith have one common foundation; the
same blow which overturns the one necessarily levels the other with
the ground. But let us pause a moment, and endeavor to discover the
advantages of Christian hope amongst men. It encourages to the
practice of virtue; it supports the unfortunate under the stroke of
affliction; and consoles the believer in the hour of adversity. But
what encouragement, what support, what consolation can be imparted to
the mind from these undefined and undefinable shadows? No one, indeed,
will deny that hope is sufficiently useful to the priests, who never
fail to call in its assistance for the vindication of Providence,
whenever any of the elect have occasion to complain of the unmerited
hardship or the transient injustice of his dispensations. Besides,
these priests, notwithstanding their beautiful systems, find
themselves unable to fulfil the high-sounding promises they so
liberally make to all the faithful, and are frequently at a loss to
explain the evils which they bring upon their flocks by means of the
quarrels they engage in, and the false notions of religion they
entertain; on these occasions the priests have a standing appeal to
hope, telling their dupes that man was not created for this world,
that heaven is his home, and that his sufferings here will be
counterbalanced by indescribable bliss hereafter. Thus, like quacks,
whose nostrums have ruined the health of their patients, they have
still left to themselves the advantage of selling hopes to those whom
they know themselves unable to cure. Our priests resemble some of our
physicians, who begin by frightening us into our complaints, in order
that they may make us customers for the hopes which they afterwards
sell to us for their weight in gold. This traffic constitutes, in
reality, all that is called religion.

The third of the Christian virtues is Charity; that is, to love God
above all things, and our neighbors as ourselves. But before we are
required to love God above all things, it seems reasonable that
religion should condescend to represent him as worthy of our love. In
good faith, Madam, is it possible to feel that the God of the
Christians is entitled to our love? Is it possible to feel any other
sentiments than those of aversion towards a partial, capricious,
cruel, revengeful, jealous, and sanguinary tyrant? How can we
sincerel