.

Governments are more interested than individuals in the destruction of
errors that often lead to confusion, anarchy, and rebellion. If men
had not become gradually enlightened, nations would now, as formerly,
be under the yoke of the Roman pontiff, who could occasion revolution
in their midst, overturn the laws, and subvert the government. But for
the insensible progress of reason, states would now be filled with a
tumultuous crowd of devotees, ready to revolt at the signal of an
unquiet priest or a seditious monk.

You perceive, then, Madam, that men who think, and who teach others to
think, are more useful to governments than those who wish to stifle
reason and to proscribe forever the liberty of thought. You see that
the true friends of a stable government are those who seek most
sedulously to enlighten, educate, and elevate the people. You feel
that by banishing knowledge and persecuting philosophy, government
sacrifices its dearest interests to a seditious clergy, whose ambition
and avarice push them to usurp boundless authority, and whose pride
always makes them indignant at being in subjection to a power which
they contend should be subordinate to themselves.

There is no priest who does not consider himself superior to the
highest ruler of any country. We have often seen the priesthood avow
pretensions of this character. The clergy are always enraged when an
attempt is made to subject them to the secular power. Such an attempt
they regard as profane, and they denounce it as tyranny whenever it is
sought to be enforced. They pretend that in all times the priesthood
has been sacred, that its rights come from God himself, and that no
government can, without sacrilege, or without outraging the Divinity,
touch the property, the privileges, or the immunities which have been
snatched from ignorance and credulity. Whenever the civil authority
would touch the objects considered inviolable and sacred in the hands
of the priests, their clamors cannot be appeased; they make efforts to
excite the people against the government; they denounce all authority
as tyrannical when it has the temerity to think of subjecting them to
the laws, of reforming their abuses, and neutralizing their power to
injure. But they consider authority legitimate when it crushes _their_
enemies, though it appears insupportable as soon as it is reasonable
and favorable to the people.

The priests are essentially the most wicked of men, and the w