se of your faculties; your reason is
misled by a bewildered imagination, and you are afflicted with
perplexities, with despondency, and with suspicion of yourself. In
this manner you become the dupe of those men who, addressing the
imagination and stifling reason, long since subjugated the universe,
and have actually persuaded reasonable beings that their reason is
either useless or dangerous.

Such is, Madam, the constant language of the apostles of superstition,
whose design has always been, and will always continue to be, to
destroy human reason in order to exercise their power with impunity
over mankind. Throughout the globe the perfidious ministers of
religion have been either the concealed or the declared enemies of
reason, because they always see reason opposed to their views. Every
where do they decry it, because they truly fear that it will destroy
their empire by discovering their conspiracies and the futility of
their fables. Every where upon its ruins they struggle to erect the
empire of fanaticism and imagination. To attain this end with more
certainty, they have unceasingly terrified mortals with hideous
paintings, have astonished and seduced them by marvels and mysteries,
embarrassed them by enigmas and uncertainties, surcharged them with
observances and ceremonies, filled their minds with terrors and
scruples, and fixed their eyes upon a future, which, far from
rendering them more virtuous and happy here below, has only turned
them from the path of true happiness, and destroyed it completely and
forever in their bosoms.

Such are the artifices which the ministers of religion every where
employ to enslave the earth and to retain it under the yoke. The human
race, in all countries, has become the prey of the priests. The
priests have given the name of _religion_ to systems invented by them
to subjugate men, whose imagination they had seduced, whose
understanding they had confounded, and whose reason they had
endeavored to extinguish.

It is especially in infancy that the human mind is disposed to receive
whatever impression is made upon it. Thus our priests have prudently
seized upon the youth to inspire them with ideas that they could never
impose upon adults. It is during the most tender and susceptible age
of men that the priests have familiarized the understanding of our
race with monstrous fables, with extravagant and disjointed fancies,
and with ridiculous chimeras, which, by degrees, become obje