le of theology more unreasonable than this, of which the
credulous, in all ages, have been the dupes. Is it not at the time of
a man's dissolution that he is the least capable of judging of his
true interest? His bodily frame racked, it may be, with pain, his mind
is necessarily weakened or chafed; or if he should be free from
excruciating pain, the lassitude and yielding of nature to the
irrevocable decrees of fate at death, unfit a man for reasoning and
judging of the sophisms that are proposed as panaceas for all his
errors. There are, without doubt, as strange notions as those of
religion; but who knows that body and soul sink alike at death?

It is in the case of health that we can promise ourselves to reason
with justness; it is then that the soul, neither troubled by fear, nor
altered by disease, nor led astray by passion, can judge soundly of
what is beneficial to man. The judgments of the dying can have no
weight with men in good health; and they are the veriest impostors who
lend them belief. The truth can alone be known, when both body and
mind are in good health. No man, without evincing an insensible and
ridiculous presumption, can answer for the ideas he is occupied with,
when worn out with sickness and disease; yet have the inhuman priests
the effrontery to persuade the credulous to take as their examples the
words and actions of men necessarily deranged in intellect by the
derangement of their corporeal frame. In short, since the ideas of men
necessarily vary with the different variations of their bodies, the
man who presumes to reason on his death bed with the man in health,
arrogates what ought not to be conceded.

Do not, then, Madam, be discouraged nor surprised, if you should
sometimes think of ancient prejudices reclaiming the rights they have
for a long time exercised over your reason; attribute, then, these
vacillations to some derangement in your frame--to some disordered
movements of mind, which, for a time, suspend your reason. Think that
there are few people who are constantly the same, and who see with the
same eyes. Our frame being subject to continual variations, it
necessarily follows that our modes of thinking will vary. We think one
custom the result of pusillanimity, when the nerves are relaxed and
our bodies fatigued. We think justly when our body is in health; that
is to say, when all its parts are fulfilling their various functions.
There is one mode of thinking, or one state of mi