against which
the favored wage war, must of necessity be eternally at odds with the
rest of the world, canting about their oracles and mysteries,
supernatural precepts, invented purely to torment the human mind, to
enthral it, and leave man answerable for what he could not obey, and
punishable for what he was restrained from performing. We need not
then be astonished if, since the origin of Christianity, our priests
have never been a single moment without disputes. It appears that God
only sent his Son upon earth that his marvellous doctrines might prove
an apple of discord both for his priests and his adorers. The
ministers of a church founded by Christ himself, who promised to send
them his Holy Spirit to lead them into all the truth, have never been
in unison with their dogmas. We have seen this infallible church for
whole ages enveloped in error. You know, Madam, that in the fourth
century, by the acknowledgment of the priests themselves, the great
body of the church followed the opinions of the Arians, who disavowed
even the divinity of Jesus Christ. The spirit of God must then have
abandoned his church; else why did its ministers fall into this error,
and dispute afterwards about so fundamental a dogma of the Christian
religion?

Notwithstanding these continual quarrels, the church arrogates to
itself the right of fixing the faith of the _true believers_, and in
this it pretends to infallibility; and if the Protestant parsons have
renounced the lofty and ridiculous pretensions of their Catholic
brethren, they are not less certain in the infallibility of their
decisions; for they talk with the authority of oracles, and send to
hell and damnation all who do not yield submission to their dogmas.
Thus on both sides of the cross they wish their assertions to be
received by their adherents as if they came direct from heaven. The
priests have always been at discord among themselves, and have
perpetually cursed, anathematized, and doomed each other to hell. The
vanity of each holy clique has caused it to adhere obstinately to its
own peculiar opinions, and to treat its adversaries as heretics.
Violence alone has generally decided the discussions, terminated the
disputes, and fixed the standard of belief. Those pugnacious, brawling
priests who were artful enough to enlist sovereigns on their side were
_orthodox_, or, in other words, boasted that they were the exclusive
possessors of the true doctrine. They made use of the