nce
with _law_, while their adversaries had no arms but those of reason,
and could not appear personally but at the peril of fines,
imprisonment, torture, and death, and were restricted from bringing
all their arsenal into service, yet they have inflicted profound,
immedicable, and incurable wounds upon superstition. Still, if we
believe the mercenaries of religion, the excellence of their system
makes it absolutely invulnerable to every blow which can be inflicted
upon it; and they pretend they have a thousand times in a victorious
manner answered the objections which are continually renewed against
them. In spite of this great security, we see them excessively alarmed
every time a new combatant presents himself, and the latter may well
and successfully use the most common objections, and those which have
most frequently been urged, since it is evident that up to the present
moment the arguments have never been obviated or opposed with
satisfactory replies. To convince you, Madam, of what I here advance,
you need only compare the most simple and ordinary difficulties which
good sense opposes to religion, with the pretended solutions that have
been given. You will perceive that the difficulties, evident even to
the capacities of a child, have never been removed by divines the most
practised in dialectics. You will find in their replies only subtle
distinctions, metaphysical subterfuges, unintelligible verbiage, which
can never be the language of truth, and which demonstrates the
embarrassment, the impotence, and the bad faith of those who are
interested by their position in sustaining a desperate cause. In a
word, the difficulties which have been urged against religion are
clear, and within the comprehension of every one, while the answers
which have been given are obscure, entangled, and far from
satisfactory, even to persons most versed in such jargon, and plainly
indicating that the authors of these replies do not themselves
understand what they say.

If you consult the clergy, they will not fail to set forth the
antiquity of their doctrine, which has always maintained itself,
notwithstanding the continual attacks of the Heretics, the Mecreans,
and the Impious generally, and also in spite of the persecutions of
the Pagans. You have, Madam, too much good sense not to perceive at
once that the antiquity of an opinion proves nothing in its favor. If
antiquity was a proof of truth, Christianity must yield to Judaism,
a