SECTION I.

A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY

VOLUME VIII

By

VOLTAIRE

EDITION DE LA PACIFICATION

THE WORKS OF VOLTAIRE

A CONTEMPORARY VERSION

With Notes by Tobias Smollett, Revised and Modernized

New Translations by William F. Fleming, and an

Introduction by Oliver H.G. Leigh

A CRITIQUE AND BIOGRAPHY

BY

THE RT. HON. JOHN MORLEY

FORTY-THREE VOLUMES

One hundred and sixty-eight designs, comprising reproductions

of rare old engravings, steel plates, photogravures,

and curious fac-similes

VOLUME XII

E.R. DuMONT

PARIS--LONDON--NEW YORK--CHICAGO

1901

_The WORKS of VOLTAIRE_

_"Between two servants of Humanity, who appeared eighteen hundred

years apart, there is a mysterious relation. * * * * Let us say it

with a sentiment of profound respect: JESUS WEPT: VOLTAIRE SMILED.

Of that divine tear and of that human smile is composed the

sweetness of the present civilization."_

_VICTOR HUGO._

LIST OF PLATES--Vol. VIII

ALLEGORICAL BUST OF VOLTAIRE--frontispiece

THE INITIATE BANISHING THE PRIEST

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

JOHN CALVIN

[Illustration: Allegorical bust of Voltaire.]

* * * * *

VOLTAIRE

A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY.

IN TEN VOLUMES

VOL. VIII

MONEY--PRIVILEGE

* * * * *

MONEY.

A word made use of to express gold. "Sir, will you lend me a hundred

louis d'or?" "Sir, I would with all my heart, but I have no money; I am

out of ready money." The Italian will say to you: "_Signore, non ha di

danari_"--"I have no deniers."

Harpagon asks Maître Jacques: "Wilt thou make a good entertainment?"

"Yes, if you will give me plenty of money."

We continually inquire which of the countries of Europe is the richest

in money? By that we mean, which is the people who circulate the most

metals representative of objects of commerce? In the same manner we ask,

which is the poorest? and thirty contending nations present

themselves--the Westphalian, Limousin, Basque, Tyrolese, Valois, Grison,

Istrian, Scotch, and Irish, the Swiss of a small canton, and above all

the subjects of the pope.

In deciding which has most, we hesitate at present between France,

Spain, and Holland, which had none in 1600.

Formerly, in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the

province of the papal treasury had no doubt the most ready money, and

therefore the greatest trade. How do you sell that? would be asked of a

theological merchant, who replied, For as much as the people are fools

enough to give me.

All Europe then sent its money to the Roman court, who gave in change

consecrated beads, agnuses, indulgences plenary and limited,

dispensations, confirmations, exemptions, benedictions, and even

excommunications against those whom the subscriber chose, and who had

not sufficient faith in the court of Rome.

The Venetians sold nothing of all this, but they traded with all the

West by Alexandria, and it was through them only that we had pepper and

cinnamon. The money which went not to the papal treasury came to them,

excepting a little to the Tuscans and Genoese. All the other kingdoms of

Europe were so poor in ready money that Charles VIII. was obliged to

borrow the jewels of the duchess of Savoy and put them in pawn, to raise

funds to conquer Naples, which he soon lost again. The Venetians

supported stronger armies than his. A noble Venetian had more gold in

his coffers, and more vessels of silver on his table, than the emperor

Maximilian surnamed "_Pochi danari._"

Things changed when the Portuguese traded with India as conquerors, and

the Spaniards subjugated Mexico and Peru with six or seven hundred men.

We know that then the commerce of Venice, and the other towns of Italy

all fell to the ground. Philip II., the master of Spain, Portugal, the

Low Countries, the Two Sicilies, and the Milanese, of fifteen hundred

leagues of coast in Asia, and mines of gold and silver in America, was

the only rich, and consequently the only powerful prince in Europe. The

spies whom he gained in France kissed on their knees the Catholic

doubloons, and the small number of angels and caroluses which circulated

in that country had not much credit. It is pretended that America and

Asia brought him in nearly ten million ducats of revenue. He would have

really bought Europe with his money, but for the iron of Henry IV. and

the fleets of Queen Elizabeth.

The "_Dictionnaire Encyclopédique,_" in the article on "Argent," quotes

the "Spirits of Laws," in which it is said: "I have heard deplored a

thousand times, the blindness of the council of Francis I., who rejected

the proposal of Christopher Columbus for the discovery of the

Indies--perhaps this imprudence has turned out a very wise thing."

We see by the enormous power of Philip that the pretended council of

Francis I. could not have done such a wise thing. But let us content

ourselves with remarking that Francis I. was not born when it is

pretended that he refused the offers of Christopher Columbus. The

Genoese captain landed in America in 1492, and Francis I. was born in

1497, and did not ascend the throne until 1515. Let us here compare the

revenues of Henry III., Henry IV., and Queen Elizabeth, with those of

Philip II. The ordinary income of Elizabeth was only one hundred

thousand pound sterling, and with extras it was, one year with another,

four hundred thousand; but she required this surplus to defend herself

from Philip II. Without extreme economy she would have been lost, and

England with her.

The revenue of Henry III. indeed increased to thirty millions of livres

of his time; this, to the sum that Philip drew from the Indies, was as

three to ten; but not more than a third of this money entered into the

coffers of Henry III., who was very prodigal, greatly robbed, and

consequently very poor. We find that Philip II. in one article was ten

times richer than Henry.

As to Henry IV., it is not worth while to compare his treasures with

those of Philip II. Until the Peace of Vervins, he had only what he

could borrow or win at the point of his sword; and he lived as a

knight-errant, until the time in which he became the first king in

Europe. England had always been so poor that King Edward III. was the

first king who coined money of gold.

Would we know what became of the money which flowed continually from

Mexico and Peru into Spain? It entered the pockets of the French,

English and Dutch, who traded with Cadiz under Spanish names; and who

sent to America the productions of their manufactories. A great part of

this money goes to the East Indies to pay for spices, cotton, saltpetre,

sugar, candy, tea, cloths, diamonds, and monkeys.

We may afterwards demand, what is become of all the treasures of the

Indies? I answer that Shah Thamas Kouli-Khan or Shah Nadir had carried

away all those of the great Mogul, together with his jewels. You would

know where those jewels are, and this money that Shah Nadir carried with

him into Persia? A part was hidden in the earth during the civil wars;

predatory leaders made use of the rest to raise troops against one

another; for, as Cæsar very well remarks: "With money we get soldiers,

and with soldiers we steal money."

Your curiosity is not yet satisfied; you are troubled to know what have

become of the treasures of Sesostris, of Crœ, Cyrus, Nebuchadnezzar, and

above all of Solomon, who, it is said, had to his own share equal to

twenty millions and more of our pounds in his coffers.

I will tell you. It is spread all over the world. Things find their

level in time. Be sure, that in the time of Cyrus, the Gauls, Germany,

Denmark, Poland, and Russia, had not a crown. Besides, that which is

lost in gilding, which is fooled away upon our Lady of Loretto, and

other places, and which has been swallowed up by the avaricious sea must

be counted.

How did the Romans under their great Romulus, the son of Mars, and a

vestal, and under the devout Numa Pompilius? They had a Jupiter of oak;

rudely carved huts for palaces; a handful of hay at the end of a stick

for a standard; and not a piece of money of twelve sous value in their

pockets. Our coachmen have gold watches that the seven kings of Rome,

the Camilluses, Manliuses, and Fabiuses, could not have paid for.

If by chance the wife of a receiver-general of finances was to have this

chapter read at her toilette by the bel-esprit of the house, she would

have a strange contempt for the Romans of the three first centuries, and

would not allow a Manlius, Curius, or Fabius to enter her antechamber,

should he come on foot, and not have wherewithal to take his part at

play.

Their ready money was of brass. It served at once for arms and money.

They fought and reckoned with brass. Three or four pounds of brass, of

twelve ounces weight, paid for an ox. They bought necessaries at market,

as we buy them at present; and men had, as in all times, food, clothing,

and habitations. The Romans, poorer than their neighbors, conquered

them, and continually augmented their territory for the space of five

hundred years, before they coined silver money.

The soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden had nothing but copper money

for their pay, before the time that they made conquests out of their own

country.

Provided we have a pledge of exchange for the necessary things of life,

commerce will continually go on. It signifies not whether this pledge be

of shells or paper. Gold and silver have prevailed everywhere, only

because they have been the most rare.

It was in Asia that the first manufactures of money of these two metals

commenced, because Asia was the cradle of all the arts.

There certainly was no money in the Trojan war. Gold and silver passed

by weight; Agamemnon might have had a treasure, but certainly no money.

What has made several hardy scholars suspect that the "Pentateuch" was

not written until the time in which the Hebrews began to procure coins

from their neighbors is that in more than one passage mention is made of

shekels. It is there said that Abraham, who was a stranger and had not

an inch of land in the country of Canaan, bought there a field and a

cave in which to bury his wife, for four hundred shekels of silver

current money. The judicious Dom Calmet values this sum at four hundred

and forty-eight livres, six sous, nine deniers, according to the ancient

calculation adopted at random, in which the silver mark was of

six-and-twenty livres value. As the silver mark has, however, increased

by half the sum, the present value would be eight hundred and ninety-six

livres.

Now, as in that time there was no coined money answering to the word

"_pecunia,_" that would make a little difficulty, from which it is not

easy to extricate ourselves.

Another difficulty is, that in one place it is said that Abraham bought

this field in Hebron, and in another at Sichem. On that point consult

the venerable Bede, Raban, Maure, and Emanuel Sa.

We will now speak of the riches which David left to Solomon in coined

money. Some make it amount to twenty-one or twenty-two millions of

French livres, others to five-and-twenty. There is no keeper of the

royal treasure, nor _tefterdan_ of the grand Turk's, who can exactly

compute the treasure of King Solomon; but the young bachelors of Oxford

and the Sorbonne make out the amount without difficulty.

I will not speak of the innumerable adventures which have happened to

money since it has been stamped, marked, valued, altered, increased,

buried, and stolen, having through all its transformations constantly

remained the idol of mankind. It is so much loved that among all

Christian princes there still exists an old law which is not to allow

gold and silver to go out of their kingdoms. This law implies one of two

things--either that these princes reign over fools who lavish their

money in a foreign country for their pleasure, or that we must not pay

our debts to foreigners. It is, however, clear that no person is foolish

enough to give his money without reason, and that, when we are in debt

to a foreigner, we should pay him either in bills of exchange,

commodities, or legitimate coin. Thus this law has not been executed

since we began to open our eyes--which is not long ago.

There are many things to be said on coined money; as on the unjust and

ridiculous augmentation of specie, which suddenly loses considerable

sums to a state on the melting down again; on the re-stamping, with an

augmentation of ideal value, which augmentation invites all your

neighbors and all your enemies to re-coin your money and gain at your

expense; in short, on twenty other equally ruinous expedients. Several

new books are full of judicious remarks upon this subject. It is more

easy to write on money than to obtain it; and those who gain it, jest

much at those who only know how to write about it.

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as

possible from one part of the citizens to give to the other.

It is demanded, if it be possible radically to ruin a kingdom of which

the soil in general is fertile. We answer that the thing is not

practicable, since from the war of 1689 till the end of 1769, in which

we write, everything has continually been done which could ruin France

and leave it without resource, and yet it never could be brought about.

It is a sound body which has had a fever of eighty years with relapses,

and which has been in the hands of quacks, but which will survive.

MONSTERS.

The definition of monsters is more difficult than is generally imagined.

Are we to apply the term to animals of enormous size; to a fish, or a

serpent fifteen feet long, for instance? There are some, however, that

are twenty or even thirty feet long, in comparison with which of course

the others, instead of enormous or monstrous, would appear small.

There are monsters through defect. But, if a generally well-made and

handsome man were destitute from his birth of the little toes and little

fingers, would he be a monster? Teeth are more necessary to a man; I

have seen a man who never had a tooth. He was in other respects pleasing

in his person. Being destitute of the organs of generation, still more

necessary in the system of nature, would not constitute the person thus

defective a monster.

There are monsters by excess as well as by defect. But those who have

six fingers, or three testicles, or two perforations instead of one, or

the spine elongated in the form of a small tail, are not considered

monsters.

The third kind consists of those which have members of other animals;

as, for example, a lion with the wings of an ostrich, or a serpent with

the wings of an eagle, like the griffin and ixion of the Jews. But all

bats have wings, and flying fish have them, without being monsters.

Let us, then, reserve the name for animals whose deformities strike us

with horror.

Yet the first negro, upon this idea, was a monster to white women; and

the most admirable of European beauties was a monster in the eyes of

negroes.

If Polyphemus and the Cyclops had really existed, people who carried an

eye on each side of the root of the nose, would, in the island of

Lipari, and the neighborhood of Mount Ætna, have been pronounced

monsters.

I once saw, at a fair, a young woman with four nipples, or rather dugs,

and what resembled the tail of a cow hanging down between them. She was

decidedly a monster when she displayed her neck, but was rather an

agreeable woman in appearance when she concealed it.

Centaurs and Minotaurs would have been monsters, but beautiful monsters.

The well-proportioned body of a horse serving as a base or support to

the upper part of a man would have been a masterpiece of nature's

workmanship on earth; just as we draw the masterpieces of heaven--those

spirits which we call angels, and which we paint and sculpture in our

churches--adorned sometimes with two wings, sometimes with four, and

sometimes even with six.

We have already asked, with the judicious Locke, what is the boundary of

distinction between the human and merely animal figure; what is the

point of monstrosity at which it would be proper to take your stand

against baptizing an infant, against admitting it as a member of the

human species, against according to it the possession of a soul? We have

seen that this boundary is as difficult to be settled as it is difficult

to ascertain what a soul is; for there certainly are none who know what

it is but theologians.

Why should the satyrs which St. Jerome saw, the offspring of women and

baboons, have been reputed monsters? Might it not be thought, on the

contrary, that their lot was in reality happier than ours? Must they not

have possessed more strength and more agility? and would they not have

laughed at us as an unfortunate race, to whom nature had refused both

tails and clothing? A mule, the offspring of two different species; a

jumart, the offspring of a bull and a mare; a tarin, the offspring, we

are told, of a canary bird and hen linnet--are not monsters.

But how is it that mules, jumarts, and tarins, which are thus produced

in nature, do not themselves reproduce? And how do the seminists,

ovists, or animalculists, explain, upon their respective theories, the

formation of these mongrel productions?

I will tell you plainly, that they do not explain it at all. The

seminists never discovered how it is that the ass communicates to his

mule offspring a resemblance only in the ears and crupper; the ovists

neither inform us, nor understand how a mare should contain in her egg

anything but an animal of her own species. And the animalculists cannot

perceive how a minute embryo of an ass could introduce its ears into the

matrix of a mare.

The theorist who, in a work entitled the "Philosophy of Venus,"

maintained that all animals and all monsters are formed by attraction,

was still less successful than those just mentioned, in accounting for

phenomena so common and yet so surprising.

Alas! my good friends! you none of you know how you originate your own

offspring; you are ignorant of the secrets of nature in your own

species, and yet vainly attempt to develop them in the mule!

It may, however, be confidently presumed, in reference to a monster by

defect, that the whole seminal matter did not reach its destined

appropriation; or, perhaps, that the small spermatic worm had lost a

portion of its substance; or, perhaps that the egg was crazed and

injured. With respect to a monster by excess, you may imagine that some

portions of the seminal matter superabounded; that of two spermatic

worms united, one could only animate a single member of the animal, and

that that member remains in supererogation; that two eggs have blended

together, and that one of them has produced but a single member, which

was joined to the body of the other.

But what would you say of so many monstrosities arising from the

addition of parts of animals of a totally different species? How would

you explain a crab on the neck of a girl? or the tail of a rat upon the

thigh? or, above all, the four dugs and tail of a cow, which was

exhibited at the fair at St. Germain? You would be reduced to the

supposition that the unfortunate woman's mother belonged to the very

extraordinary family of _Pasiphæ._

Let each of us boldly and honestly say, How little is it that I really

know.

MORALITY.

Babblers, preachers, extravagant controversialists! endeavor to remember

that your master never announced that the sacrament was the visible sign

of an invisible thing; He has nowhere admitted four cardinal virtues,

and three divine ones. He has never decided whether His mother came into

the world maculate or immaculate. Cease, therefore, to repeat things

which never entered into His mind. He has said, in conformity with a

truth as ancient as the world--Love God and your neighbor. Abide by that

precept, miserable cavillers! Preach morality and nothing more. Observe

it, and let the tribunals no longer echo with your prosecutions; snatch

no longer, by the claw of an attorney, their morsel of bread from the

widow and the orphan. Dispute not concerning some petty benefice with

the same fury as the papacy was disputed in the great schism of the

West. Monks! place not to the utmost of your power, the universe under

contribution, and we may then be able to believe you. I have just read

these words in a piece of declamation in fourteen volumes, entitled,

"The History of the Lower Empire"; "The Christians had a morality, but

the Pagans had none."

Oh, M. Le Beau! author of these fourteen volumes, where did you pick up

this absurdity? What becomes of the morality of Socrates, of Zaleucus,

of Charondas, of Cicero, of Epictetus, and of Marcus Aurelius?

There is but one morality, M. Le Beau, as there is but one geometry. But

you will tell me that the greater part of mankind are ignorant of

geometry. True; but if they apply a little to the study of it, all men

draw the same conclusions. Agriculturists, manufacturers, artisans, do

not go through a regular course of morality; they read neither the "_De

Finibus_" of Cicero, nor the "Ethics" of Aristotle; but as soon as they

reflect, they are, without knowing it, disciples of Cicero. The Indian

dyer, the Tartarian shepherd, and the English seaman, are acquainted

with justice and injustice. Confucius did not invent a system of morals,

as men construct physical systems. He found his in the hearts of all

mankind.

This morality existed in the bosom of the prætor Festus, when the Jews

pressed him to put Paul to death for having taken strangers into their

temple. "Learn," said he, "that the Romans never condemn any one

unheard."

If the Jews were deficient in a moral sense, the Romans were not, and

paid it homage.

There is no morality in superstition; it exists not in ceremonies, and

has nothing to do with dogmas. We cannot repeat too frequently that

dogmas differ, but that morality is the same among all men who make use

of their reason. Morality proceeds from God, like light; our

superstitions are only darkness. Reflect, reader; pursue the truth, and

draw the consequences.

MOSES.

SECTION I.

Philosophy, of which we sometimes pass the boundaries, researches of

antiquity, and the spirit of discussion and criticism, have been carried

so far that several learned men have finally doubted if there ever was a

Moses, and whether this man was not an imaginary being, such as were

Perseus, Bacchus, Atlas, Penthesilea, Vesta, Rhea Silvia, Isis,

Sammonocodom, Fo, Mercury, Trismegistus, Odin, Merlin, Francus, Robert

the Devil, and so many other heroes of romance whose lives and prowess

have been recorded.

It is not very likely, say the incredulous, that a man ever existed

whose life is a continual prodigy.

It is not very likely that he worked so many stupendous miracles in

Egypt, Arabia, and Syria, without their being known throughout the

world.

It is not likely that no Egyptian or Greek writer should have

transmitted these miracles to posterity. They are mentioned by the Jews

alone; and in the time that this history was written by them, they were

not known to any nation--not indeed until towards the second century.

The first author who expressly quotes the Book of Moses is Longinus,

minister of Queen Zenobia, in the time of the emperor Aurelian.

It is to be remarked that the author of the "_Mercury Trismegistus,_"

who certainly was an Egyptian, says not a single word about this Moses.

If a single ancient author had related a single one of these miracles,

Eusebius would no doubt have triumphed in this evidence, either in his

"History" or in his "Evangelical Preparation."

It is true, he mentions authors who have quoted his name, but none who

have cited his prodigies. Before him, the Jews, Josephus and Philo, who

have so much celebrated their own nation, sought all the writers in

which the name of Moses is found, but there was not a single one who

made the least mention of the marvellous actions attributed to him.

In this silence of the whole world, the incredulous reason with a

temerity which refutes itself.

The Jews are the only people who possessed the Pentateuch, which they

attribute to Moses. It is said, even in their books, that this

Pentateuch was not known until the reign of their king Josiah,

thirty-six years before the destruction and captivity of Jerusalem; and

they then only possessed a single copy, which the priest Hilkiah found

at the bottom of a strong box, while counting money. The priest sent it

to the king by his scribe Shaphan. All this, say they, necessarily

obscures the authenticity of the Pentateuch.

In short, if the Pentateuch was known to all the Jews, would

Solomon--the wise Solomon, inspired by God Himself to build a

temple--have ornamented this temple with so many statues, contrary to

the express order of Moses?

All the Jewish prophets, who prophesied in the name of the Lord from the

time of Moses till that of King Josiah, would they not have been

supported in all their prophecies by the laws of Moses? Would they not a

thousand times have quoted his own words? Would they not have commented

upon them? None of them, however, quote two lines--no one follows the

text of Moses--they even oppose them in several places.

According to these unbelievers, the books attributed to Moses were only

written among the Babylonians during the captivity, or immediately

afterwards by Esdras. Indeed, we see only Persian and Chaldæan

terminations in the Jewish writings: "_Babel,_" gate of God;

"_Phegor-beel,_" or "_Beel-phegor,_" god of the precipices;

"_Zebuth-beel,_" or "_Beel-zebuth,_" god of insects; "_Bethel,_" house

of God; "_Daniel,_" judgment of God; "_Gabriel,_" man of God; "_Jahel,_"

afflicted of God; "_Jael,_" the life of God; "_Israel,_" seeing God;

"_Oviel,_" strength of God; "_Raphael,_" help of God; "_Uriel,_" fire of

God.

Thus, all is foreign in the Jewish nation, a stranger itself in

Palestine; circumcision, ceremonies, sacrifices, the ark, the cherubim,

the goat Hazazel, baptism of justice, simple baptism, proofs,

divination, interpretation of dreams, enchantment of serpents--nothing

originated among these people, nothing was invented by them.

The celebrated Lord Bolingbroke believed not that Moses ever existed; he

thought he saw in the Pentateuch a crowd of contradictions and puzzling

chronological and geographical faults; names of towns not then built,

precepts given to kings at a time when not only the Jews had no kings,

but in which it is probable there were none, since they lived in

deserts, in tents, in the manner of the Bedouin Arabs.

What appears to him above all the most palpable contradiction is the

gift of forty-eight cities with their suburbs, made to the Levites in a

country in which there was not a single village; and it is principally

on these forty-eight cities that he refutes Abbadie, and even has the

cruelty to treat him with the aversion and contempt of a lord of the

Upper Chamber, or a minister of state towards a petty foreign priest who

would be so impertinent as to reason with him.

I will take the liberty of representing to Viscount Bolingbroke, and to

all those who think with him, not only that the Jewish nation has always

believed in the existence of Moses, and in that of his books, but that

even Jesus Christ has acknowledged him. The four Gospels, the Acts of

the Apostles, recognize him. St. Matthew says expressly, that Moses and

Elias appeared to Jesus Christ on the mountain during the night of the

transfiguration, and St. Luke says the same.

Jesus Christ declares in St. Matthew that he is not come to abolish this

law, but to accomplish it. In the New Testament, we are often referred

to the law of Moses and to the prophets. The whole Church has always

believed the Pentateuch written by Moses; and further, of five hundred

different societies, which have been so long established in Christendom,

none have ever doubted the existence of this great prophet. We must,

therefore, submit our reason, as so many men have done before us.

I know very well that I shall gain nothing in the mind of the viscount,

or of those of his opinion. They are too well persuaded that the Jewish

books were not written until very late, and during the captivity of the

two tribes which remained. But we shall possess the consolation of

having the Church with us.

SECTION II.

If you would be instructed and amused with antiquity, read the life of

Moses in the article on "Apocrypha."

In vain have several scholars believed that the Pentateuch could not

have been written by Moses. They say that it is affirmed even by the

Scripture, that the first known copy was found in the time of King

Josiah, and that this single copy was brought to the king by the

secretary Shaphan. Now, between the time of Moses and this adventure of

the secretary Shaphan, there were one thousand one hundred and

sixty-seven years, by the Hebrew computation. For God appeared to Moses

in the burning bush, in the year of the world 2213, and the secretary

Shaphan published the book of the law in the year of the world 3380.

This book found under Josiah, was unknown until the return from the

Babylonish captivity; and it is said that it was Esdras, inspired by

God, who brought the Holy Scriptures to light.

But whether it was Esdras or another who digested this book is

absolutely indifferent, since it is inspired. It is not said in the

Pentateuch, that Moses was the author; we might, therefore, be permitted

to attribute it to the declaration of some other divine mind, if the

Church had not decided that the book is by Moses.

Some opposers add, that no prophet has quoted the books of the

Pentateuch, that there is no mention of it either in the Psalms or in

the books attributed to Solomon, in Jeremiah or Isaiah, or, in short, in

any canonical book of the Jews. Words answering to those of Genesis,

Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, are not found in any other

language recognized by them as authentic. Others, still more bold, have

put the following questions:

1. In what language could Moses have written in a savage desert? It

could only be in Egyptian; for by this same book we are told that Moses

and all his people were born in Egypt. It is therefore probable that

they spoke no other language. The Egyptians had yet made no use of

papyrus; they engraved hieroglyphics on tables of wood or marble. It is

even said, that the tables of the commandments were engraved on polished

stones, which required prodigious time and labor.

2. Is it likely, that in a desert where the Jewish people had neither

shoemaker nor tailor--in which the God of the universe was obliged to

work a continual miracle to preserve the old dresses and shoes of the

Jews--men could be found clever enough to engrave the five books of the

Pentateuch on marble or wood? You will say, that they found laborers who

made a golden calf in one night, and who afterwards reduced the gold

into powder--an operation impracticable to common chemistry, which was

not yet discovered. Who constructed the tabernacle? Who ornamented

thirty columns of brass with capitals of silver? Who wove and

embroidered veils of linen with hyacinth, purple, and scarlet? An

account that supports the opinion of the contradictors. They answer,

that it was not possible that in a desert, where they were in want of

everything, for them to perform works so intricate; that they must have

begun by making shoes and tunics; that those who wanted necessaries

could not indulge in luxuries; and that it is an evident contradiction

to say, that they had founders, engravers, and embroiderers, when they

had neither clothes nor bread.

3. If Moses had written the first chapter of Genesis, would all young

people have been forbidden to read the first chapter? Would so little

respect have been paid to the legislator? If it was Moses who said that

God punished the iniquity of the fathers to the fourth generation, would

Ezekiel have dared to say the contrary?

4. If Moses wrote Leviticus, could he have contradicted it in

Deuteronomy? Leviticus forbids a woman to marry her brother, Deuteronomy

commands it.

5. Could Moses have spoken of towns which existed not in his time? Would

he have said that towns which, in regard to him, were on the east of the

Jordan were on the west?

6. Would he have assigned forty-eight cities to the Levites, in a

country in which there were never ten, and in a desert in which he had

always wandered without habitation?

7. Would he have prescribed rules for the Jewish kings, when not only

there were no kings among this people, but they were held in horror, and

it was not probable they would ever have any? What! would Moses have

given precepts for the conduct of kings who came not until five hundred

years after him, and have said nothing in relation to the judges and

priests who succeeded him? Does not this religion lead us to believe

that the Pentateuch was composed in the time of kings, and that the

ceremonies instituted by Moses were only traditional.

8. Suppose he had said to the Jews: I have made you depart to the number

of six hundred thousand combatants from the land of Egypt under the

protection of your God? Would not the Jews have answered him: You must

have been very timid not to lead us against Pharaoh of Egypt; he could

not have opposed to us an army of two hundred thousand men. There never

was such an army on foot in Egypt; we should have conquered them easily;

we should have been the masters of their country. What! has the God, who

talks to you, to please us slain all the first-born of Egypt, which, if

there were in this country three hundred thousand families, makes three

hundred thousand men destroyed in one night, simply to avenge us, and

yet you have not seconded your God and given us that fertile country

which nothing could withhold from us. On the contrary you have made us

depart from Egypt as thieves and cowards, to perish in deserts between

mountains and precipices. You might, at least, have conducted us by the

direct road to this land of Canaan, to which we have no right, but which

you have promised us, and on which we have not yet been able to enter.

It was natural that, from the land of Goshen, we should march towards

Tyre and Sidon, along the Mediterranean; but you made us entirely pass

the Isthmus of Suez, and re-enter Egypt, proceed as far as Memphis, when

we find ourselves at Beel-Sephor on the borders of the Red Sea, turning

our backs on the land of Canaan, having journeyed eighty leagues in this

Egypt which we wished to avoid, so as at last to nearly perish between

the sea and the army of Pharaoh!

If you had wished to deliver us to our enemies, you could not have taken

a different route and other measures. God has saved us by a miracle, you

say; the sea opened to let us pass; but after such a favor, should He

let us die of hunger and fatigue in the horrible deserts of

Kadesh-barnea, Mara, Elim, Horeb, and Sinai? All our fathers perished in

these frightful solitudes; and you tell us, at the end of forty years,

that God took particular care of them.

This is what these murmuring Jews, these unjust children of the

vagabonds who died in the desert, might have said to Moses, if he had

read Exodus and Genesis to them. And what might they not have said and

done on the article of the golden calf? What! you dare to tell us that

your brother made a calf for our fathers, when you were with God on the

mountain? You, who sometimes tell us that you have spoken to God face to

face, and sometimes that you could only see His back! But no matter, you

were with this God, and your brother cast a golden calf in one day, and

gave it to us to adore it; and instead of punishing your unworthy

brother, you make him our chief priest, and order your Levites to slay

twenty-three thousand men of your people. Would our fathers have

suffered this? Would they have allowed themselves to be sacrificed like

so many victims by sanguinary priests? You tell us that, not content

with this incredible butchery, you have further massacred twenty-four

thousand of our poor followers because one of them slept with a

Midianitish woman, whilst you yourself espoused a Midianite; and yet you

add, that you are the mildest of men! A few more instances of this

mildness, and not a soul would have remained.

No; if you have been capable of all this cruelty, if you can have

exercised it, you would be the most barbarous of men, and no punishment

would suffice to expiate so great a crime.

These are nearly the objections which all scholars make to those who

think that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch. But we answer them,

that the ways of God are not those of men; that God has proved,

conducted, and abandoned His people by a wisdom which is unknown to us;

that the Jews themselves, for more than two thousand years, have

believed that Moses is the author of these books; that the Church, which

has succeeded the synagogue, and which is equally infallible, has

decided this point of controversy; and that scholars should remain

silent when the Church pronounces.

SECTION III.

We cannot doubt that there was a Moses, a legislator of the Jews. We

will here examine his history, following merely the rules of criticism;

the Divine is not submitted to similar examination. We must confine

ourselves to the probable; men can only judge as men. It is very natural

and very probable that an Arab nation dwelt on the confines of Egypt, on

the side of Arabia Deserta; that it was tributary or slave to the

Egyptian kings, and that afterwards it sought to establish itself

elsewhere; but that which reason alone cannot admit is, that this

nation, composed of seventy persons at most in the time of Joseph,

increased in two hundred and fifteen years, from Joseph to Moses, to the

number of six hundred thousand combatants, according to the Book of

Exodus, which six hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms imply a

multitude of about two millions, counting old men, women, and children.

It is not certainly in the course of nature for a colony of seventy

persons, as many males as females, to produce in two centuries two

millions of inhabitants. The calculations made on this progression by

men very little versed in the things of this world, are falsified by the

experience of all nations and all times. Children are not made by a

stroke of the pen. Reflect well that at this rate a population of ten

thousand persons in two hundred years would produce more inhabitants

than the globe of the earth could sustain.

Is it any more probable, that these six hundred thousand combatants,

favored by the Author of nature who worked for them so many prodigies,

were forced to wander in the deserts in which they died, instead of

seeking to possess themselves of fertile Egypt?

By these rules of an established and reasonable human criticism, we must

agree that it is very likely that Moses conducted a small people from

the confines of Egypt. There was among the Egyptians an ancient

tradition, related by Plutarch in his "Treatise on Isis and Osiris,"

that Tiphon, the father of Jerosselaim and Juddecus, fled from Egypt on

an ass. It is clear from this passage that the ancestors of the Jews,

the inhabitants of Jerusalem, were supposed to have been fugitives from

Egypt. A tradition, no less ancient and more general is, that the Jews

were driven from Egypt, either as a troop of unruly brigands, or a

people infected with leprosy. This double accusation carries its

probability even from the land of Goshen, which they had inhabited, a

neighboring land of the vagabond Arabs, and where the disease of

leprosy, peculiar to the Arabs, might be common. It appears even by the

Scripture that this people went from Egypt against their will. The

seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy forbids kings to think of leading the

Jews back to Egypt.

The conformity of several Egyptian and Jewish customs still more

strengthens the opinion that this people was an Egyptian colony, and

what gives it a new degree of probability is the feast of the Passover;

that is to say, of the flight or passage instituted in memory of their

evasion. This feast alone would be no proof; for among all peoples there

are solemnities established to celebrate fabulous and incredible events;

such were most of the feasts of the Greeks and Romans; but a flight from

one country to another is nothing uncommon, and calls for belief. The

proof drawn from this feast of the Passover receives a still greater

force by that of the Tabernacles, in memory of the time in which the

Jews inhabited the desert on their departure from Egypt. These

similitudes, united with so many others, prove that a colony really went

from Egypt, and finally established itself for some time at Palestine.

Almost all the rest is of a kind so marvellous that human sagacity

cannot digest it. All that we can do is to seek the time in which the

history of this flight--that is to say, the Book of Exodus--can have

been written, and to examine the opinions which then prevailed;

opinions, of which the proof is in the book itself, compared with the

ancient customs of nations.

With regard to the books attributed to Moses, the most common rules of

criticism permit us not to believe that he can be the author of them.

1. It is not likely that he spoke of the places by names which were not

given to them until long afterwards. In this book mention is made of the

cities of Jair, and every one agrees that they were not so named until

long after the death of Moses. It also speaks of the country of Dan, and

the tribe of Dan had not given its name to the country of which it was

not yet the master.

2. How could Moses have quoted the book of the wars of the Lord, when

these wars and this book were after his time?

3. How could Moses speak of the pretended defeat of a giant named Og,

king of Bashan, vanquished in the desert in the last year of his

government? And how could he add, that he further saw his bed of iron of

nine cubits long in Rabath? This city of Rabath was the capital of the

Ammonites, into whose country the Hebrews had not yet penetrated. Is it

not apparent, that such a passage is the production of a posterior

writer, which his inadvertence betrays? As an evidence of the victory

gained over the giant, he brings forward the bed said to be still at

Rabath, forgetting that it is Moses whom he makes speak, who was dead

long before.

4. How could Moses have called cities beyond the Jordan, which, with

regard to him, were on this side? Is it not palpable, that the book

attributed to him was written a long time after the Israelites had

crossed this little river Jordan, which they never passed under his

conduct?

5. Is it likely that Moses told his people, that in the last year of his

government he took, in the little province of Argob--a sterile and

frightful country of Arabia Petræa--sixty great towns surrounded with

high fortified walls, independent of an infinite number of open cities?

Is it not much more probable that these exaggerations were afterwards

written by a man who wished to flatter a stupid nation?

6. It is still less likely, that Moses related the miracles with which

this history is filled.

It is easy to persuade a happy and victorious people that God has fought

for them; but it is not in human nature that a people should believe a

hundred miracles in their favor, when all these prodigies ended only in

making them perish in a desert. Let us examine some of the miracles

related in Exodus.

7. It appears contradictory and injurious to the divine essence to

suppose that God, having formed a people to be the sole depository of

His laws, and to reign over all nations, should send a man of this

people to demand of the king, their oppressor, permission to go into the

desert to sacrifice to his God, that this people might escape under the

pretence of this sacrifice. Our common ideas cannot forbear attaching an

idea of baseness and knavery to this management, far from recognizing

the majesty and power of the Supreme Being.

When, immediately after, we read that Moses changed his rod into a

serpent, before the king, and turned all the waters of the kingdom into

blood; that he caused frogs to be produced which covered the surface of

the earth; that he changed all the dust into lice, and filled the air

with venomous winged insects; that he afflicted all the men and animals

of the country with frightful ulcers; that he called hail, tempests, and

thunder, to ruin all the country; that he covered it with locusts; that

he plunged it in fearful darkness for three days; that, finally, an

exterminating angel struck with death all the first-born of men and

animals in Egypt, commencing with the son of the king; again, when we

afterwards see his people walking across the Red Sea, the waves

suspended in mountains to the right and left, and later falling on the

army of Pharaoh, which they swallowed up--when, I say, we read all these

miracles, the first idea which comes into our minds is, that this

people, for whom God performed such astonishing things, no doubt became

the masters of the universe. But, no! the fruit of so many wonders was,

that they suffered want and hunger in arid sands; and--prodigy upon

prodigy--all died without seeing the little corner of earth in which

their descendants afterwards, for some years, established themselves! It

is no doubt pardonable if we disbelieve this crowd of prodigies, at the

least of which reason so decidedly revolts.

This reason, left to itself, cannot be persuaded that Moses wrote such

strange things. How can we make a generation believe so many miracles

uselessly wrought for it, and all of which, it is said, were performed

in the desert? What being, enjoying divine power, would employ it in

preserving the clothes and shoes of these people, after having armed all

nature in their favor?

It is therefore very natural to think that all this prodigious history

was written a long time after Moses, as the romances of Charlemagne were

forged three centuries after him; and as the origins of all nations have

not been written until they were out of sight, the imagination has been

left at liberty to invent. The more coarse and unfortunate a people are,

the more they seek to exalt their ancient history; and what people have

been longer miserable, or more barbarous, than the Jews?

It is not to be believed that, when they had not wherewithal to make

shoes in their deserts, under the government of Moses, there were any

cunning enough to write. We should presume, that the poor creatures born

in these deserts did not receive a very brilliant education; and that

the nation only began to read and write when it had some commerce with

Phœnicia. It was probably in the commencement of monarchy that the Jews,

feeling they had some genius, wrote the Pentateuch, and adjusted their

traditions. Would they have made Moses recommend kings to read and write

his law in a time in which there were no kings? Is it not probable, that

the seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy was composed to moderate the

power of royalty; and that it was written by priests in the time of

Saul?

It is most likely at this epoch that we must place the digest of the

Pentateuch. The frequent slaveries to which this people were subject

seem badly calculated to establish literature in a nation, and to render

books very common; and the more rare these books were in the

commencement, the more the authors ventured to fill them with miracles.

The Pentateuch, attributed to Moses, is, no doubt, very ancient; if it

was put in order in the time of Saul and Solomon, it was about the time

of the Trojan war, and is one of the most curious monuments of the

manner of thinking of that time. We see that all known nations, in

proportion to their ignorance, were fond of prodigies. All was then

performed by celestial ministry in Egypt, Phrygia, Greece, and Asia.

The authors of the Pentateuch give us to understand that every nation

has its gods, and that these gods have all nearly an equal power.

If Moses, in the name of God, changed his rod into a serpent, the

priests of Pharaoh did as much; if he changed all the waters of Egypt

into blood, even to that which was in the vases, the priests immediately

performed the same prodigy, without our being able to conceive on what

waters they performed this metamorphosis; at least, unless they

expressly created new waters for the purpose. The Jewish writers prefer

being reduced to this absurdity, rather than allow us to suspect that

the gods of Egypt had not the power of changing water into blood as well

as the God of Jacob.

But when the latter fills the land of Egypt with lice, changing all the

dust into them, His entire superiority appears; the magi cannot imitate

it, and they make the God of the Jews speak thus: "Pharaoh shall know

that nothing is equal to me." These words put into his mouth, merely

mark a being who believes himself more powerful than his rivals; he was

equalled in the metamorphosis of a rod into a serpent, and in that of

the waters into blood; but he gains the victory in the article of the

lice and the following miracles.

This idea of the supernatural power of priests of all countries is

displayed in several places of Scripture. When Balaam, the priest of the

little state of a petty king, named Balak, in the midst of deserts, is

near cursing the Jews, their God appears to him to prevent him. It seems

that the malediction of Balaam was much to be feared. To restrain this

priest, it is not enough that God speaks to him, he sends before him an

angel with a sword, and speaks Himself again by the mouth of his ass.

All these precautions certainly prove the opinion which then prevailed,

that the malediction of a priest, whatever it was, drew fatal

consequences after it.

This idea of a God superior to other gods, though He made heaven and

earth, was so rooted in all minds, that Solomon in his last prayer

cries: "Oh, my God! there is no other god like thee in earth or heaven."

It is this opinion which rendered the Jews so credulous respecting the

sorceries and enchantments of other nations.

It is this which gave rise to the story of the Witch of Endor, who had

the power of invoking the shade of Saul. Every people had their

prodigies and oracles, and it never even came into the minds of any

nations to doubt the miracles and prophecies of others. They were

contented with opposing similar arms; it seems as if the priests, in

denying the prodigies of other nations, feared to discredit their own.

This kind of theology prevailed a long time over all the earth.

It is not for us to enter here on the detail of all that is written on

Moses. We speak of his laws in more than one place in this work. We will

here confine ourselves to remarking how much we are astonished to see a

legislator inspired by God; a prophet, through whom God Himself speaks,

proposing to us no future life. There is not a single word in Leviticus,

which can lead us to suspect the immortality of the soul. The reply to

this overwhelming difficulty is, that God proportioned Himself to the

ignorance of the Jews. What a miserable answer! It was for God to

elevate the Jews to necessary knowledge--not to lower Himself to them.

If the soul is immortal, if there are rewards and punishments in another

life, it is necessary for men to be informed of it. If God spoke, He

must have informed them of this fundamental dogma. What legislator, what

god but this, proposes to his people wine, oil, and milk alone! What god

but this always encourages his believers, as a chief of robbers

encourages his troops, with the hope of plunder only! Once more; it is

very pardonable for mere human reason simply to see, in such a history,

the barbarous stupidity of the first ages of a savage people. Man,

whatever he does, cannot reason otherwise; but if God really is the

author of the Pentateuch, we must submit without reasoning.

MOTION.

A philosopher, in the neighborhood of Mount Krapak, argued with me that

motion is essential to matter.

"Everything moves," says he; "the sun continually revolves on its own

axis; the planets do the same, and every planet has many different

motions; everything is a sieve; everything passes through a sieve; the

hardest metal is pierced with an infinity of pores, by which escapes a

constant torrent of vapors that circulate in space. The universe is

nothing but motion; motion, therefore, is essential to matter."

"But, sir," said I to him, "might not any one say, in answer to what you

have advanced: This block of marble, this cannon, this house, this

motion, are not in motion; therefore motion is not essential?"

"They do move," he replied; "they move in space together with the earth

by the common motion, and they move so incontestably--although

insensibly--by their own peculiar motion, that, at the expiration of an

indefinite number of centuries, there will remain not a single atom of

the masses which now constitute them, from which particles are detaching

themselves every passing moment."

"But, my good sir, I can conceive matter to be in a state of rest;

motion, therefore, cannot be considered essential to it."

"Why, certainly, it must be of vast consequence whether you conceive it

to be, or conceive it not to be, in a state of rest. I still repeat,

that it is impossible for it to be so."

"This is a bold assertion; but what, let me ask you, will you say to

chaos?"

"Oh, chaos! If we were inclined to talk about chaos, I should tell you

that all was necessarily in motion, and that 'the breath of God moved

upon the waters'; that the element of water was recognized in existence,

and that the other elements existed also; that, consequently, fire

existed; that there cannot be fire without motion, that motion is

essential to fire. You will not succeed much with chaos."

"Alas! who can succeed with all these subjects of dispute? But, as you

are so very fully acquainted with these things, I must request you to

inform me why one body impels another: whether it is because matter is

impenetrable, or because two bodies cannot be together in one place; or

because, in every case of every description, the weak is driven before

the strong?"

"Your last reason is rather more facetious than philosophical. No person

has hitherto been able to discover the cause of the communication of

motion."

"That, however, does not prevent its being essential to matter. No one

has ever been able to discover the cause of sensation in animals; yet

this sensation is so essential to them, that, if you exclude the idea of

it, you no longer have the idea of an animal."

"Well, I will concede to you, for a moment, that motion is essential to

matter--just for a moment, let it be remembered, for I am not much

inclined to embroil myself with the theologians--and now, after this

admission, tell me how one ball produces motion in another?"

"You are very curious and inquisitive; you wish me to inform you of what

no philosopher ever knew."

"It appears rather curious, and even ludicrous, that we should know the

laws of motion, and yet be profoundly ignorant of the principle of the

communication of motion!"

"It is the same with everything else; we know the laws of reasoning, but

we know not what it is in us that reasons. The ducts through which our

blood and other animal fluids pass are very well known to us, but we

know not what forms that blood and those fluids. We are in life, but we

know not in what the vital principle consists."

"Inform me, however, at least, whether, if motion be essential to

matter, there has not always existed the same quantity of motion in the

world?"

"That is an old chimera of Epicurus revived by Descartes. I do not, for

my own part, see that this equality of motion in the world is more

necessary than an equality of triangles. It is essential that a triangle

should have three angles and three sides, but it is not essential that

the number of triangles on this globe should be always equal."

"But is there not always an equality of forces, as other philosophers

express it?"

"That is a similar chimera. We must, upon such a principle, suppose that

there is always an equal number of men, and animals, and moving beings,

which is absurd."

By the way, what, let me ask, is the force of a body in motion? It is

the product of its quantity multiplied by its velocity in a given time.

Calling the quantity of a body four, and its velocity four, the force of

its impulse will be equal to sixteen. Another quantity we will assume to

be two, and its velocity two; the force with which that impels is as

four. This is the grand principle of mechanics. Leibnitz decidedly and

pompously pronounced the principle defective. He maintained that it was

necessary to measure that force, that product, by the quantity

multiplied by the square of the velocity. But this was mere captious

sophistry and chicanery, an ambiguity unworthy of a philosopher, founded

on an abuse of the discovery of the great Galileo, that the spaces

traversed with a motion uniformly accelerated were, to each other, as

the squares of the times and velocities.

Leibnitz did not consider the time which he should have considered. No

English mathematician adopted his system. It was received for a while by

a small number of geometricians in France. It pervaded some books, and

even the philosophical institutions of a person of great celebrity.

Maupertuis is very abusive of Mairan, in a little work entitled "A, B,

C"; as if he thought it necessary to teach the _a, b, c,_ of science to

any man who followed the old and, in fact, the true system of

calculation. Mairan was, however, in the right. He adhered to the

ancient measurement, that of the quantity multiplied by the velocity. He

gradually prevailed over his antagonists, and his system recovered its

former station; the scandal of mathematics disappeared, and the quackery

of the square of the velocity was dismissed at last to the extramundane

spaces, to the limbo of vanity, together with the monads which Leibnitz

supposed to constitute the concentric mirror of nature, and also with

his elaborate and fanciful system of "pre-established harmony."

MOUNTAIN.

The fable of the mountain which, after alarming the whole neighborhood

with its outcries in labor, was ridiculed by all present when it became

delivered of a mouse, is at once ancient and universal. The company,

however, who thus gave way to ridicule were not a company of

philosophers. Those who mocked should in reality have admired. A

mountain's being delivered of a mouse was an event as extraordinary, and

as worthy of admiration, as a mouse's being delivered of a mountain. A

rock's producing a rat is a case absolutely prodigious, and the world

never beheld anything approaching to such a miracle. All the worlds in

the universe could not originate a fly. Thus, in cases where the vulgar

mock, the philosopher admires; and where the vulgar strain their eyes in

stupid astonishment, he often smiles.

NAIL.

We only ask here from the censors of books, permission to transcribe

from that which the Dominican missionary Labat, proveditor of the holy

office, has written concerning the nails of the cross, into which it is

more than probable no nails were ever driven.

"The Italian priest who conducted us had sufficient interest to get us,

among other things, a sight of the nails with which our Saviour was

fastened to the cross. They appeared to me very different from those

which the Benedictines show at St. Denis. Possibly those belonging to

St. Denis served for the feet, and the others for the hands. It was

necessary that those for the hands should be sufficiently large and

strong to support all the weight of the body. However, the Jews must

either have made use of more than four nails, or some of those which are

shown to the faithful are not genuine. History relates that St. Helena

threw one of them into the sea, to appease a furious tempest which

assailed the ship in which she had embarked. Constantine made use of

another, to make a bit for the bridle of his horse. One is shown entire

at St. Denis in France; another also entire at the Holy Cross of

Jerusalem at Rome. A very celebrated Roman author of our day asserts

that the iron crown with which they crown the emperors in Italy was made

out of one of these nails. We are shown at Rome and at Carpentras two

bridle bits also made of these nails, not to mention more at other

places. To be sure, several of them are discreet enough to say, that it

is the head or point only of these nails which they exhibit."

The missionary speaks in the same tone of all the relics. He observes in

the same passage, that when the body of the first deacon, St. Stephen,

was brought from Jerusalem to Rome, in 557, and placed in the tomb of

the deacon of St. Lawrence: "St. Lawrence made way of himself to give

the right hand to his predecessor; an action which procured him the name

of the civil Spaniard."

Upon this passage we venture only one reflection, which is, that if some

philosopher had said as much, in the "Encyclopædia", as the Dominican

Labat, a crowd of Pantouillets, Nonnottes, Chiniacs, Chaumeix, and other

knaves, would have exclaimed--Deist, atheist, and geometrician!

According to circumstances things change their names.

_Selon ce que l'on peut être_

_Les choses changent de nom._

--_Amphytrion,_ Prologue.

NATURE.

_Dialogue Between The Philosopher And Nature._

PHILOSOPHER.

What are you, Nature? I live in you? but I have been searching for you

for fifty years, and have never yet been able to find you.

NATURE.

The ancient Egyptians, whose lives it is said extended to twelve hundred

years, attached the same reproach to me. They called me Isis; they

placed a thick veil over my head; and they said that no one could ever

raise it.

PHILOSOPHER.

It is on that account that I apply directly to yourself. I have been

able to measure some of your globes, to ascertain their courses, and to

point out the laws of motion; but I have never been able to ascertain

what you are yourself.

Are you always active? Are you always passive? Do your elements arrange

themselves, as water places itself over sand, oil over water, and air

over oil? Have you a mind which directs all your operations--as councils

are inspired as soon as they meet, although the individual members

composing them are often ignorant? Explain to me, I entreat, the enigma

in which you are enveloped.

NATURE.

I am the great universal system. I know nothing farther. I am no

mathematician, and yet everything in and about me is arranged agreeably

to mathematical laws. Conjecture, if you can, how all this is effected.

PHILOSOPHER.

Certainly, since your great universal system knows nothing of

mathematics, and yet the laws by which you are regulated are those of

the most profound geometry, there must necessarily be an eternal

geometrician, who directs you, and presides over your operations.

NATURE.

You are perfectly right; I am water, earth, fire, air, metal, mineral,

stone, vegetable, and animal. I clearly perceive that there is an

intelligence in me: you possess an intelligence, although you see it

not. Neither do I see mine; I feel this invisible power; I am unable to

know it: why should you, who are only a very minute portion of myself,

be anxious to know what I myself am ignorant of?

PHILOSOPHER.

We are curious. I should be pleased to learn how it is, that while so

rough and coarse in your mountains, and deserts, and seas, you are at

the same time so ingenious and finished in your animals and vegetables?

NATURE.

My poor child, shall I tell you the real truth? I have had bestowed upon

me a name that does not at all suit me: I am called nature, while I am

all art.

PHILOSOPHER.

That word deranges all my ideas. What! is it possible that nature should

be nothing but art.

NATURE.

It is undoubtedly the case. Do you not know that there is infinite art

in those seas and mountains which you represent as so rough and so

coarse? Do you not know that all those waters gravitate towards the

centre of the earth, and are raised only by immutable laws; and that

those mountains which crown the earth are immense reservoirs of eternal

snows, incessantly producing the fountains, lakes, and rivers, without

which my animal and vegetable off-spring would inevitably perish? And,

with respect to what are denominated my animal, vegetable, and mineral

kingdoms, constituting thus only three kingdoms, be assured that I have

in fact millions of them. But if you consider the formation of an

insect, of an ear of corn, of gold, or of copper, all will exhibit to

you prodigies of art.

PHILOSOPHER.

It is undoubtedly true. The more I reflect on the subject, the more

clearly I perceive that you are only the art of some Great Being,

extremely powerful and skilful, who conceals Himself and exhibits you.

All the reasoners, from the time of Thales, and probably long before

him, have been playing at hide and seek with you. They have said, "I

have hold of you"; and they in fact held nothing. We all resemble Ixion:

he thought he embraced Juno, when he embraced only a cloud.

NATURE.

Since I am the whole that exists, how is it possible for a being like

you, so small a portion of myself, to comprehend me? Be contented, my

dear little atomic children, with seeing a few particles that surround

you, with drinking a few drops of my milk, with vegetating for a few

moments in my bosom, and at last dying without any knowledge of your

mother and your nurse.

PHILOSOPHER.

My beloved mother, pray tell me a little why you exist--why anything has

existed?

NATURE.

I will answer you in the language in which I always have answered, for

so long a series of ages, those who have interrogated me on the subject

of first principles: "I know nothing at all about the matter."

PHILOSOPHER.

Nothing itself, would it not be preferable to that multitude of

existences formed to be continually dissolved; those tribes of animals

born and reproduced to devour others, and devoured in their turn; those

numberless beings endued with sensation, and formed to experience so

many sensations of pain; and those other tribes of reasoning beings

which never, or at least only rarely, listen to reason? For what

purpose, Nature, was all this?

NATURE.

Oh! pray go and inquire of Him who made me.

NECESSARY--NECESSITY.

OSMIN.

Do you not assert that everything is necessary?

SELIM.

If all be not necessary, it follows that God does unnecessary things.

OSMIN.

That is to say, it was necessary for the Divine Nature to do what it has

done.

SELIM.

I believe, or at least I suspect so. There are men who think

differently. I do not understand them; but possibly they are right. I

fear to dispute on this subject.

OSMIN.

It is, however, necessary for me to talk to you upon it.

SELIM.

In what manner? Would you speak of what is necessary to sustain life, or

the evil to which people are reduced who cannot procure it?

OSMIN.

No; for that which is necessary to one is not always necessary to

another. It is necessary for an Indian to possess rice, for an

Englishman to eat animal food, as Russians must wear furs, and Africans

gauze. One man believes that he has need of a dozen coach-horses,

another limits himself to a pair of shoes, and a third walks gayly on

his bare feet. I wish to speak to you of that which is necessary to all

men.

SELIM.

It appears to me that God has given us all that is necessary in this

sense: eyes to see, feet to walk, a mouth to eat, a gullet to swallow, a

stomach to digest, a brain to reason, and organs to produce our kind.

OSMIN.

How happens it then that men are sometimes born who are deprived of a

part of these necessary faculties?

SELIM.

Because the general laws of nature are liable to accidents which produce

monsters; but in general man is provided with all things necessary to

his existence in society.

OSMIN.

Are there not notions common to all men necessary to this purpose?

SELIM.

Yes; I have travelled with Paul Lucas, and wherever I went I saw that

man respected his father and mother; that he thought himself bound to

keep his promise; that he pitied oppressed innocence; that he detested

persecution; that he regarded freedom of thinking as a right of nature,

and the enemies of that freedom as the enemies of the human race. They

who think differently appear to me to be badly organized, and monsters,

like those who are born without eyes or heads.

OSMIN.

These necessary things--are they necessary in all times, and in all

places?

SELIM.

Yes: otherwise they would not be necessary to human kind.

OSMIN.

Therefore, a new creed is not necessary to mankind. Men could live in

society, and perform all their duties towards God, before they believed

that Mahomet had frequent conversations with the angel Gabriel.

SELIM.

Nothing is more evident; it would be ridiculous to think that man could

not perform his duties until Mahomet came into the world. It was no way

necessary for men to believe the Koran. The world went on before the

appearance of Mahomet, precisely as at present. If Mahometanism was

necessary to the world, it would exist everywhere. God, who has given us

two eyes to see the sun, would have bestowed upon us some means of

discovering the truths of the Mahometan religion. That sect therefore

resembles the arbitrary laws which change according to times and places,

like fashions or the theories of physicians, which displace and succeed

one another. The Mahometan religion cannot therefore be essentially

necessary to man.

OSMIN.

But since it exists, God has permitted it.

SELIM.

Yes, as He permits all the world to abound in absurdities, errors, and

calamities. This is not saying that men were absolutely created in order

to be foolish and unhappy. God permits some men to be eaten by serpents,

but we ought not to say that God made man to be eaten by serpents.

OSMIN.

What do you mean by saying that God permits? Can anything happen but by

His orders? To permit and to will--are they not with Him the same thing?

SELIM.

He permits crime, but does not commit it.

OSMIN.

To commit a crime is to act against Divine justice--to disobey God.

Therefore, as God cannot disobey Himself, He cannot commit crime; but He

has so made man that man commits it frequently. How does that arise?

SELIM.

Some men can tell, but I am not one of them. All that I know is, that

the Koran is ridiculous, although possessing here and there things which

are passable. The Koran, however, is certainly not necessary to

man--that I maintain. I perceive clearly that which is false, but know

very little of that which is true.

OSMIN.

I thought that you would instruct me, but you teach me nothing.

SELIM.

Is it not something to know the men who deceive you, and the gross and

dangerous errors they promulgate?

OSMIN.

I should have cause to complain of a physician who made me acquainted

with poisonous plants, without instructing me in regard to such as are

salutary.

SELIM.

I am no physician, nor are you a sick man; and it appears to me that I

give you a very useful prescription, when I say to you: Distrust the

inventions of charlatans; worship God; be an honest man; and believe

that two and two make four.

NEW--NOVELTIES.

It seems as if the first words of Ovid's "Metamorphoses"--"_In nova fert

animus_"--were the emblem of mankind. No one is touched with the

admirable spectacle of the sun which rises or seems to rise every day;

but everybody runs at the smallest meteor which appears for a moment in

the map of vapors which surround the earth, and which we call heaven. We

despise whatever is common, or which has been long known:

_Vilia sunt nobis quæcumque prioribus annis_

_Vidimus, et sordet quidquid spectavimus olim._

A hawker will not burden himself with a "Virgil" or a "Horace," but with

a new book, were it ever so detestable. He draws you aside and says to

you: "Sir, will you have some books from Holland?"

From the commencement of the world, women have complained of the

infidelities done to them in favor of the first new object which

presents itself, and which has often this novelty for its only merit.

Several ladies--we must confess it, notwithstanding the infinite respect

which we have for them--have treated men as they complain that the men

have treated them; and the story of Jocondo is much more ancient than

Ariosto.

Perhaps this universal taste for novelty is a benefit of nature. We are

told: Content yourselves with what you have; desire nothing beyond your

situation; subdue the restlessness of your mind. These are very good

maxims; but if we had followed them, we should still live upon acorns

and sleep under the stars, and we should have had neither Corneille,

Racine, Molière, Poussin, Le Brun, Lemoine, nor Pigal.

NUDITY.

Why do we shut up a man or a woman whom we find naked in the streets?

and why is no one offended at entirely naked statues, and with certain

paintings of Jesus and of Magdalen which are to be seen in some of the

churches? It is very likely that human beings existed for a considerable

time without clothing. In more than one island and on the continent of

America, people are still found who are ignorant of clothing.

The most civilized of them conceal the organs of generation by leaves,

by interlaced rushes or mats, and by feathers. Whence this latter

modesty? Is it the instinct of nature to provoke desire by the

concealment of that which we are inclined to discover? Is it true that

among nations somewhat more polished than the Jews and demi-Jews, there

are entire sects who, when they worship God, deprive themselves of

clothing. Such have been, it is said, the Adamites and the Abelians.

They assembled, naked, to sing the praises of God. St. Epiphanius and

St. Augustine say this, who, it is true, were not contemporaries, and

who lived very distant from their country. But after all, this folly is

possible, and is not more extraordinary or insane than a hundred other

follies which have made the tour of the world, one after another.

We have seen, in the article "Emblem", that the Mahometans still possess

saints who are mad, and who go about naked as apes. It is very possible

that crazy people have existed, who thought that it was more proper to

present ourselves before the Deity in the state in which He has formed

us, than under any disguise of our own invention. It is possible that

these persons exposed themselves out of pure devotion. There are so few

well-made people of either sex, that nudity may have inspired chastity,

or rather disgust, instead of augmenting desire.

It is moreover asserted that the Abelians renounced marriage. If they

abounded in youthful gallants and amorous maidens, they were the less

comparable with St. Adhelm and the happy Robert D'Arbriselle, who lay

with the most beautiful women, only in order to prove the strength of

their continence. I confess, however, that it must be pleasant to

witness a hundred naked Helens and Parises singing anthems, giving one

another the kiss of peace, and performing the ceremonies of the agapæ.

All this proves that there is nothing so singular, so extravagant, or so

superstitious, which has not been conceived by the head of man. Happy it

is, when these follies do not trouble society, and make of it a scene of

hate, of discord, and of fury. It is doubtless better to pray to God

stark naked, than to soil His altars and the public places with human

blood.

NUMBER.

Was Euclid right in defining number to be a collection of unities of the

same kind? When Newton says that number is an abstract relation of one

quantity to another of the same kind, does he not understand by that the

use of numbers in arithmetic and geometry? Wolfe says, number is that

which has the same relation with unity as one right line has with

another. Is not this rather a property attributed to a number, than a

definition? If I dared, I would simply define numbers the idea of

several unities.

I see white--I have a sensation, an idea of white. It signifies not

whether these two things are or are not of the same species; I can

reckon two ideas. I see four men and four horses--I have the idea of

eight; in like manner, three stones and six trees will give me the idea

of nine.

That I add, multiply, subtract, and divide these, are operations of the

faculty of thought which I have received from the master of nature; but

they are not properties inherent to number. I can square three and cube

it, but there is not certainly in nature any number which can be squared

or cubed. I very well conceive what an odd or even number is, but I can

never conceive either a perfect or an imperfect one.

Numbers can have nothing by themselves. What properties, what virtue,

can ten flints, ten trees, ten ideas, possess because they are ten? What

superiority will one number divisible in three even parts have over

another divisible in two?

Pythagoras was the first, it is said, who discovered divine virtue in

numbers. I doubt whether he was the first; for he had travelled in

Egypt, Babylon, and India, and must have related much of their arts and

knowledge. The Indians particularly, the inventors of the combined and

complicated game of chess, and of ciphers, so convenient that the Arabs

learned of them, through whom they have been communicated to us after so

many ages--these same Indians, I say, joined strange chimeras to their

sciences. The Chaldæans had still more, and the Egyptians more still. We

know that self-delusion is in our nature. Happy is he who can preserve

himself from it! Happy is he who, after having some access of this fever

of the mind, can recover tolerable health.

Porphyrius, in the "Life of Pythagoras," says that the number 2 is

fatal. We might say, on the contrary, that it is the most favorable of

all. Woe to him that is always single! Woe to nature, if the human

species and that of animals were not often two and two!

If 2 was of bad augury, 3, by way of recompense, was admirable, and 4

was divine; but the Pythagoreans and their imitators forgot that this

mysterious 4, so divine, was composed of twice that diabolical number 2!

Six had its merit, because the first statuaries divided their figures

into six modules. We have seen that, according to the Chaldæans, God

created the world in six _gahambars;_ but 7 was the most marvellous

number; for there were at first but seven planets, each planet had its

heaven, and that made seven heavens, without anyone knowing what was

meant by the word heaven.

All Asia reckoned seven days for a week. We divide the life of man into

seven ages. How many reasons have we in favor of this number!

The Jews in time collected some scraps of this philosophy. It passed

among the first Christians of Alexandria with the dogmas of Plato. It is

principally displayed in the "Apocalypse of Cerinthus," attributed to

John the Apostle.

We see a striking example of it in the number of the beast: "That no man

might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast,

or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath

understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a

man; and his number is six hundred three score and six."

We know what great pains all the great scholars have taken to divine the

solution of this enigma. This number, composed of three times two at

each figure, does it signify three times fatal to the third power? There

were two beasts, and we know not yet of which the author would speak.

We have seen that Bossuet, less happy in arithmetic than in funeral

orations, has demonstrated that Diocletian is the beast, because we find

the Roman figures 666 in the letters of his name, by cutting off those

which would spoil this operation. But in making use of Roman figures, he

does not remember that the Apocalypse was written in Greek. An eloquent

man may fall into this mistake. The power of numbers was much more

respected among us when we knew nothing about them.

You may observe, my dear reader, in the article on "Figure," some fine

allegories that Augustine, bishop of Hippo, extracted from numbers.

This taste subsisted so long, that it triumphed at the Council of Trent.

We preserve its mysteries, called "Sacraments" in the Latin church,

because the Dominicans, with Soto at their head, allege that there are

seven things which contribute to life, seven planets, seven virtues,

seven mortal sins, six days of creation and one of repose, which make

seven; further, seven plagues of Egypt, seven beatitudes; but

unfortunately the fathers forget that Exodus reckons ten plagues, and

that the beatitudes are to the number of eight in St. Matthew and four

in St. Luke. But scholars have overcome this difficulty; by retrenching

from St. Matthew the four beatitudes of St. Luke, there remain six, and

add unity to these six, and you will have seven. Consult Fra Paolo

Sarpi, in the second book of his history of the County of Trent.

NUMBERING.

SECTION I.

The most ancient numberings that history has left us are those of the

Israelites, which are indubitable, since they are extracted from the

Jewish books. We believe that we must not reckon as a numbering the

flight of the Israelites to the number of six hundred thousand men on

foot, because the text specifies them not tribe by tribe; it adds, that

an innumerable troop of people gathered together and joined them. This

is only a relation.

The first circumstantial numbering is that which we see in the book of

the "Viedaber," which we call Numbers. By the reckoning which Moses and

Aaron made of the people in the desert, we find, in counting all the

tribes except that of Levi, six hundred and three thousand five hundred

and fifty men capable of bearing arms; and if we add the tribe of Levi,

supposing it equal in number to the others, the strong with the weak, we

shall have six hundred and fifty-three thousand nine hundred and

thirty-five men, to which we must add an equal number of old women and

children, which will compose two millions six hundred and fifteen

thousand seven hundred and forty-two persons, who departed from Egypt.

When David, after the example of Moses, ordered the numbering of all the

people, he found eight hundred thousand warriors of the tribes of

Israel, and five hundred thousand of that of Judah, according to the

Book of Kings; but according to Chronicles they reckoned eleven hundred

thousand warriors in Israel; and less than five hundred thousand in

Judah.

The Book of Kings formally excludes Levi and Benjamin, and counts them

not. If therefore we join these two tribes to the others in their

proportion, the total of the warriors will amount to nineteen hundred

and twenty thousand. This is a great number for the little country of

Judæa, the half of which is composed of frightful rocks and caverns: but

it was a miracle.

It is not for us to enter into the reasons for which the Sovereign

Arbiter of kings and people punished David for an operation which he

himself commanded to Moses. It still less becomes us to seek why God,

being irritated against David, punished the people for being numbered.

The prophet Gad ordered the king on the part of God to choose war,

famine, or pestilence. David accepted the pestilence, and seventy

thousand Jews died of it in three days.

St. Ambrosius, in his book of "Repentance," and St. Augustine in his

book against Faustus, acknowledged that pride and ambition led David to

make this calculation. Their opinion is of great weight, and we can

certainly submit to their decision by extinguishing all the deceitful

lights of our own minds.

Scripture relates a new numbering in the time of Esdras, when the Jewish

nation returned from captivity. "All this multitude (say equally Esdras

and Nehemiah, being as one man) amounted to forty-two thousand three

hundred and sixty persons." They were all named by families, and they

counted the number of Jews of each family, and the number of priests.

But in these two authors there are not only differences between the

numbers and the names of families, but we further see an error of

calculation in both. By the calculation of Esdras, instead of forty-two

thousand men, after computation we find but twenty-nine thousand eight

hundred and eighteen; and by that of Nehemiah we find thirty-one

thousand and eighty-nine.

We must consult the commentators on this apparent mistake, particularly

Dom Calmet, who adding to one of these calculations what is wanting to

the other, and further adding what is wanted to both of them, solves all

the difficulty. To the computations of Esdras and Nehemiah, as reckoned

by Calmet, are wanting ten thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven

persons; but we find them in families which could not give their

genealogy; besides, if there were any fault of the copyist, it could not

destroy the veracity of the divinely inspired text.

It is to be believed that the great neighboring kings of Palestine made

numberings of their people as frequently as possible. Herodotus gives us

the amount of all those who followed Xerxes, without including his naval

forces. He reckons seventeen hundred thousand men, and he pretends, that

to arrive at this computation, they were sent in divisions of ten

thousand into a place which would only hold this number of men closely

crowded. This method is very faulty, for by crowding a little less, each

division of ten thousand might easily contain only from eight to nine.

Further, this method is not at all soldier-like, and it would have been

much more easy to have counted the whole by making the soldiers march in

rank and file.

It should further be observed, how difficult it was to support seventeen

hundred thousand men in the country of Greece, which they went to

conquer. We may very well doubt of this number, and the manner of

reckoning it; of the whipping given to the Hellespont; and of the

sacrifice of a thousand oxen made to Minerva by a Persian king, who knew

her not, and who adored the sun alone as the only emblem of the

Divinity. Besides, the numbering of seventeen hundred thousand men is

not complete, even by the confession of Herodotus, since Xerxes further

carried with him all the people of Thrace and Macedonia, whom he forced,

he says, to follow him, apparently the sooner to starve his army. We

should therefore do here what all wise men do in reading ancient, and

even modern histories--suspend our judgment and doubt much.

The first numbering which we have of a profane nation is that made by

Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. He found, says Titus Livius,

eighty thousand combatants, all Roman citizens: that implies three

hundred and twenty thousand citizens at least, as many old people, women

and children, to which we must add at least twenty thousand domestics,

slaves and freemen.

Now we may reasonably doubt whether the little Roman state contained

this number. Romulus only reigned (if we may call him king) over about

three thousand bandits, assembled in a little town between the

mountains. This town was the worst land of Italy. The circuit of all his

country was not three thousand paces. Servius was the sixth chief or

king of this rising people. The rule of Newton, which is indubitable for

elective kingdoms, gives twenty-one years' reign to each king, and by

that contradicts all the ancient historians, who have never observed the

order of time, nor given any precise date. The five kings of Rome must

have reigned about a hundred years.

It is certainly not in the order of nature that an ungrateful soil,

which was not five leagues in length or three in breadth, and which must

have lost many of its inhabitants in its almost continual little wars,

could be peopled with three hundred and forty thousand souls. There is

not half the number in the same territory at present, when Rome is the

metropolis of the Christian world; when the affluence of foreigners and

the ambassadors of so many nations must serve to people the towns; when

gold flows from Poland, Hungary, half of Germany, Spain, and France, by

a thousand channels into the purse of the treasury, and must further

facilitate population, if other causes intercept it.

As the history of Rome was not written until more than five hundred

years after its foundation, it would not be at all surprising if the

historians had liberally given Servius Tullius eighty thousand warriors

instead of eight thousand, through false zeal for their country. Their

zeal would have been much more judicious if they had confessed the weak

commencement of their republic. It is much more noble to be raised from

so poor an origin to so much greatness, than to have had double the

soldiers of Alexander to conquer about fifteen leagues of country in

four hundred years.

The census was never taken except of Roman citizens. It is pretended

that under Augustus it amounted to four millions one hundred and

thirty-seven thousand in the year 29 before our vulgar era, according to

Tillemont, who is very exact, and Dion Cassius, who is no less so.

Lawrence Echard admits but one numbering, of four millions one hundred

and thirty-seven thousand men, in the year 14 of our era. The same

Echard speaks of a general numbering of the empire for the first year of

the same era; but he quotes no Roman author, nor specifies any

calculation of the number of citizens. Tillemont does not speak in any

way of this numbering.

We have quoted Tacitus and Suetonius, but to very little purpose. The

census of which Suetonius speaks is not a numbering of citizens; it is

only a list of those to whom the public furnished corn. Tacitus only

speaks, in book ii., of a census established among the Gauls, for the

purpose of raising more tribute on each head. Augustus never made a

calculation of the other subjects of his empire, because they paid not

the poll-tax, which he wished to establish in Gaul.

Tacitus says that Augustus had a memoir, written in his own hand, which

contained the revenues of the empire, the fleets and contributary

kingdoms. He speaks not of any numbering. Dion Cassius speaks of a

census, but he specifies no number.

Josephus, in his "Antiquities," says that in the year 759 of Rome--the

time answering to the eleventh year of our era--Cyrenius, then

constituted governor of Syria, caused a list to be made of all the

property of the Jews, which caused a revolt. This has no relation to a

general numbering, and merely proves that this Cyrenius was not governor

of Judæa--which was then a little province of Syria--until ten years

after, and not at the birth of our Saviour.

These seem to me to be all the principal passages that we can collect in

profane histories, touching the numberings attributed to Augustus. If we

refer to them, Jesus Christ would be born under the government of Varus,

and not under that of Cyrenius; and there could have been no universal

numbering. But St. Luke, whose authority should prevail over that of

Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion Cassius, and all the writers of

Rome--St. Luke affirms positively that there was a universal numbering

of all the earth, and that Cyrenius was governor of Judæa. We must

therefore refer solely to him, without even seeking to reconcile him

with Flavius Josephus, or with any other historian. As to the rest,

neither the New nor the Old Testament has been given to us to enlighten

points of history, but to announce salutary truths, before which all

events and opinions should vanish. It is thus that we always reply to

the false calculations, contradictions, absurdities, enormous faults of

geography, chronology, physics, and even common sense, with which

philosophers tell us the Holy Scripture is filled; we cease not to reply

that there is here no question of reason, but of faith and piety.

SECTION II.

With regard to the numbers of the moderns, kings fear not at present

that a doctor Gad should propose to them on the part of God, either

famine, war, or pestilence, to punish them for wishing to know the

amount of their subjects. None of them know it. We conjecture and guess,

and always possibly within a few millions of men.

I have carried the number of inhabitants which compose the empire of

Russia to twenty-four millions, in the statements which have been sent

to me; but I have not guaranteed this valuation, because I know very

little about it. I believe that Germany possessed as many people,

reckoning the Hungarians. If I am deceived by one or two millions, we

know it is a trifle in such a case.

I beg pardon of the King of Spain, if I have only awarded him seven

millions of subjects in our continent. It is a very small number; but

Don Ustaris, employed in the ministry, gives him no more. We reckon from

about nine to ten millions of free beings in the three kingdoms of Great

Britain. In France we count between sixteen and twenty millions. This is

a proof that Doctor Gad has nothing wherewith to reproach the ministry

of France.

As to the capital towns, opinions are further divided. According to some

calculators, Paris has seven hundred thousand inhabitants, and according

to others five hundred thousand. It is thus with London, Constantinople,

and Grand Cairo.

As to the subjects of the pope, they will make a crowd in paradise, but

the multitude is moderate on earth. Why so?--because they are subjects

of the pope. Would Cato the Censor have ever believed the Romans would

come to that pass?

OCCULT QUALITIES.

Occult qualities have for a very long time been much derided; it would

be more proper to deride those who do not believe in them. Let us for

the hundredth time repeat that every principle, every primitive source

of any of the works which come from the hand of the _demiourgos,_ is

occult, and eternally hidden from mortals.

What is the centripetal force, the force of gravitation, which acts

without contact at such immense distances? What causes our hearts to

beat sixty times a minute? What other power changes this grass into milk

in the udder of a cow? and this bread into the flesh, blood, and bone of

that child, who grows proportionally while he eats it, until he arrives

at the height determined by nature, after which there is no art which

can add a line to it.

Vegetables, minerals, animals, where is your originating principle? In

the hands of Him who turns the sun on its axis, and who has clothed it

with light. This lead will never become silver, nor this silver gold;

this gold will never become diamond, nor this straw be transformed into

lemons and bananas. What corpuscular system of physics, what atoms,

determine their nature? You know nothing about it, and the cause will be

eternally occult to you. All that surrounds us, all within us, is an

enigma which it is not in the power of man to divine.

The furred ignoramus ought to have been aware of this truth when he said

that beasts possess a vegetative and sensitive soul, and man a soul

which is vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual. Poor man, kneaded up

of pride, who has pronounced only words--have you ever seen a soul? Know

you how it is made? We have spoken much of the soul in these inquiries,

but have always confessed our ignorance. I now repeat this confession

still more emphatically, since the more I read, the more I meditate, and

the more I acquire, the more am I enabled to affirm that I know nothing.

OFFENCES (LOCAL).

If we travel throughout the whole earth, we still find that theft,

murder, adultery, calumny, etc., are regarded as offences which society

condemns and represses; but that which is approved in England and

condemned in Italy, ought it to be punished in Italy, as if it were one

of the crimes against general humanity? That which is a crime only in

the precincts of some mountains, or between two rivers, demands it not

from judges more indulgence than those outrages which are regarded with

horror in all countries? Ought not the judge to say to himself, I should

not dare to punish in Ragusa what I punish at Loretto? Should not this

reflection soften his heart, and moderate the hardness which it is too

apt to contract in the long exercise of his employment? The "Kermesses"

of Flanders are well known; they were carried in the last century to a

degree of indecency, revolting to the eyes of all persons who were not

accustomed to such spectacles.

The following is the manner in which Christmas is celebrated in some

countries. In the first place appears a young man half-naked, with wings

on his shoulders; he repeats the Ave Maria to a young girl, who replies

"fiat," and the angel kisses her on the mouth; after which a child, shut

up in a great cock of pasteboard, imitates the crowing of the cock.

"_Puer natus est nobis._" A great ox bellows out "ubi"; a sheep baas out

"Bethlehem"; an ass brays "hihanus", to signify "eamus"; and a long

procession, preceded by four fools with bells and baubles, brings up the

rear. There still remain some traces of this popular devotion, which

among a civilized and educated people would be taken for profanation. A

Swiss, out of patience, and possibly more intoxicated than the

performers of the ox and the ass, took the liberty of remonstrating with

them at Louvain, and was rewarded with no small number of blows; they

would indeed have hanged him, and he escaped with great difficulty.

The same man had a dangerous quarrel at The Hague for violently taking

the part of Barnevelt against an outrageous Gomarist. He was imprisoned

at Amsterdam for saying that priests were the scourge of humanity, and

the source of all our misfortunes. "How!" said he, "if we maintain that

good works are necessary to salvation, we are sent to a dungeon; and if

we laugh at a cock and an ass we risk hanging!" Ridiculous as this

adventure was, it is sufficient to convince us that we may be criminal

in one or two points in our hemisphere, and innocent in all the rest of

the world.

ONAN.

The race of Onan exhibits great singularities. The patriarch Judah, his

father, lay with his daughter-in-law, Tamar the Phœnician, in the

highroad; Jacob, the father of Judah, was at the same time married to

two sisters, the daughters of an idolater; and deluded both his father

and father-in-law. Lot, the granduncle of Jacob, lay with his two

daughters. Saleum, one of the descendants of Jacob and of Judah,

espoused Rahab the Canaanite, a prostitute. Boaz, son of Saleum and

Rahab, received into his bed Ruth the Midianite; and was great

grandfather of David. David took away Bathsheba from the warrior Uriah,

her husband, and caused him to be slain, that he might be unrestrained

in his amour. Lastly, in the two genealogies of Christ, which differ in

so many points, but agree in this, we discover that he descended from

this tissue of fornication, adultery, and incest.

Nothing is more proper to confound human prudence; to humble our limited

minds; and to convince us that the ways of Providence are not like our

ways. The reverend father Dom Calmet makes this reflection, in alluding

to the incest of Judah with Tamar, and to the sin of Onan, spoken of in

the 38th chapter of "Genesis": "Scripture," he observes, "gives us the

details of a history, which on the first perusal strikes our minds as

not of a nature for edification; but the hidden sense which is shut up

in it is as elevated as that of the mere letter appears low to carnal

eyes. It is not without good reasons that the Holy Spirit has allowed

the histories of Tamar, of Rahab, of Ruth, and of Bathsheba, to form a

part of the genealogy of Jesus Christ."

It might have been well if Dom Calmet had explained these sound reasons,

by which we might have cleared up the doubts and appeased the scruples

of all the honest and timorous souls who are anxious to comprehend how

this Supreme Being, the Creator of worlds, could be born in a Jewish

village, of a race of plunderers and of prostitutes. This mystery, which

is not less inconceivable than other mysteries, was assuredly worthy the

explanation of so able a commentator--but to return to our subject.

We perfectly understand the crime of the patriarch Judah, and of the

patriarchs Simeon and Levi, his brothers, at Sichem; but it is more

difficult to understand the sin of Onan. Judah had married his eldest

son Er to the Phœnician, Tamar. Er died in consequence of his

wickedness, and the patriarch wished his second son to espouse the

widow, according to an ancient law of the Egyptians and Phœnicians,

their neighbors, which was called raising up seed for his brother. The

first child of this second marriage bore the name of the deceased, and

this Onan objected to. He hated the memory of his brother, or to produce

a child to bear the name of Er; and to avoid it took the means which are

detailed in the chapter of "Genesis" already mentioned, and which are

practised by no species of animals but apes and human beings.

An English physician wrote a small volume on this vice, which he called

after the name of the patriarch who was guilty of it. M. Tissot, the

celebrated physician of Lausanne, also wrote on this subject, in a work

much more profound and methodical than the English one. These two works

detail the consequences of this unhappy habit--loss of strength,

impotence, weakness of the stomach and intestines, tremblings, vertigo,

lethargy, and often premature death.

M. Tissot, however, to console us for this evil, relates as many

examples of the mischiefs of repletion in both sexes. There cannot be a

stronger argument against rash vows of chastity. From the examples

afforded, it is impossible to avoid being convinced of the enormous

folly of condemning ourselves to these turpitudes in order to renounce a

connection which has been expressly commanded by God Himself. In this

manner think the Protestants, the Jews, the Mahometans, and many other

nations; the Catholics offer other reasons in favor of converts. I shall

merely say of the Catholics what Dom Calmet says of the Holy Ghost--That

their reasons are doubtless good, could we understand them.

OPINION.

What is the opinion of all the nations of the north of America, and

those which border the Straits of Sunda, on the best of governments, and

best of religions; on public ecclesiastical rights; on the manner of

writing history; on the nature of tragedy, comedy, opera, eclogue, epic

poetry; on innate ideas, concomitant grace, and the miracles of Deacon

Paris? It is clear that all these people have no opinions on things of

which they have no ideas.

They have a confused feeling of their customs, and go not beyond this

instinct. Such are the people who inhabit the shores of the Frozen Sea

for the space of fifteen hundred leagues. Such are the inhabitants of

the three parts of Africa, and those of nearly all the isles of Asia; of

twenty hordes of Tartars, and almost all men solely occupied with the

painful and continual care of providing their subsistence. Such are, at

two steps from us, most of the Morlachians, many of the Savoyards, and

some citizens of Paris.

When a nation begins to be civilized, it has some opinions which are

quite false. It believes in spirits, sorcerers, the enchantment of

serpents and their immortality; in possessions of the devil, exorcisms,

and soothsayers. It is persuaded that seeds must grow rotten in the

earth to spring up again, and that the quarters of the moon are the

causes of accesses of fever.

A Talapoin persuades his followers that the god Sammonocodom sojourned

some time at Siam, and that he cut down all the trees in a forest which

prevented him from flying his kite at his ease, which was his favorite

amusement. This idea takes root in their heads; and finally, an honest

man who might doubt this adventure of Sammonocodom, would run the risk

of being stoned. It requires ages to destroy a popular opinion. Opinion

is called the queen of the world; it is so; for when reason opposes it,

it is condemned to death. It must rise twenty times from its ashes to

gradually drive away the usurper.

OPTIMISM.

I beg of you, gentlemen, to explain to me how everything is for the

best; for I do not understand it. Does it signify that everything is

arranged and ordered according to the laws of the impelling power? That

I comprehend and acknowledge. Do you mean that every one is well and

possesses the means of living--that nobody suffers? You know that such

is not the case. Are you of the opinion that the lamentable calamities

which afflict the earth are good in reference to God; and that He takes

pleasure in them? I credit not this horrible doctrine; neither do you.

Have the goodness to explain how all is for the best. Plato, the

dialectician, condescended to allow to God the liberty of making five

worlds; because, said he, there are five regular solids in geometry, the

tetrahedron, the cube, the hexahedron, the dodecahedron, and the

icosahedron. But why thus restrict divine power? Why not permit the

sphere, which is still more regular, and even the cone, the pyramid of

many sides, the cylinder, etc.?

God, according to Plato, necessarily chose the best of all possible

worlds; and this system has been embraced by many Christian

philosophers, although it appears repugnant to the doctrine of original

sin. After this transgression, our globe was no more the best of all

possible worlds. If it was ever so, it might be so still; but many

people believe it to be the worst of worlds instead of the best.

Leibnitz takes the part of Plato; more readers than one complain of

their inability to understand either the one or the other; and for

ourselves, having read both of them more than once, we avow our

ignorance according to custom; and since the gospel has revealed nothing

on the subject, we remain in darkness without remorse.

Leibnitz, who speaks of everything, has treated of original sin; and as

every man of systems introduces into his plan something contradictory,

he imagined that the disobedience towards God, with the frightful

misfortunes which followed it, were integral parts of the best of

worlds, and necessary ingredients of all possible felicity: "_Calla,

calla, senor don Carlos; todo che se haze es por su ben._"

What! to be chased from a delicious place, where we might have lived for

ever only for the eating of an apple? What! to produce in misery

wretched children, who will suffer everything, and in return produce

others to suffer after them? What! to experience all maladies, feel all

vexations, die in the midst of grief, and by way of recompense be burned

to all eternity--is this lot the best possible? It certainly is not

_good_ for us, and in what manner can it be so for God? Leibnitz felt

that nothing could be said to these objections, but nevertheless made

great books, in which he did not even understand himself.

Lucullus, in good health, partaking of a good dinner with his friends

and his mistress in the hall of Apollo, may jocosely deny the existence

of evil; but let him put his head out of the window and he will behold

wretches in abundance; let him be seized with a fever, and he will be

one himself.

I do not like to quote; it is ordinarily a thorny proceeding. What

precedes and what follows the passage quoted is too frequently

neglected; and thus a thousand objections may rise. I must,

notwithstanding, quote Lactantius, one of the fathers, who, in the

thirteenth chapter on the anger of God, makes Epicurus speak as follows:

"God can either take away evil from the world and will not; or being

willing to do so, cannot; or He neither can nor will; or, lastly, He is

both able and willing. If He is willing to remove evil and cannot, then

is He not omnipotent. If He can, but will not remove it, then is He not

benevolent; if He is neither able nor willing, then is He neither

powerful nor benevolent; lastly, if both able and willing to annihilate

evil, how does it exist?"

The argument is weighty, and Lactantius replies to it very poorly by

saying that God wills evil, but has given us wisdom to secure the good.

It must be confessed that this answer is very weak in comparison with

the objection; for it implies that God could bestow wisdom only by

allowing evil--a pleasant wisdom truly! The origin of evil has always

been an abyss, the depth of which no one has been able to sound. It was

this difficulty which reduced so many ancient philosophers and

legislators to have recourse to two principles--the one good, the other

wicked. Typhon was the evil principle among the Egyptians, Arimanes

among the Persians. The Manichæans, it is said, adopted this theory; but

as these people have never spoken either of a good or of a bad

principle, we have nothing to prove it but the assertion.

Among the absurdities abounding in this world, and which may be placed

among the number of our evils, that is not the least which presumes the

existence of two all-powerful beings, combating which shall prevail most

in this world, and making a treaty like the two physicians in Molière:

"Allow me the emetic, and I resign to you the lancet."

Basilides pretended, with the platonists of the first century of the

church, that God gave the making of our world to His inferior angels,

and these, being inexpert, have constructed it as we perceive. This

theological fable is laid prostrate by the overwhelming objection that

it is not in the nature of a deity all-powerful and all-wise to intrust

the construction of a world to incompetent architects.

Simon, who felt the force of this objection, obviates it by saying that

the angel who presided over the workmen is damned for having done his

business so slovenly, but the roasting of this angel amends nothing. The

adventure of Pandora among the Greeks scarcely meets the objection

better. The box in which every evil is enclosed, and at the bottom of

which remains Hope, is indeed a charming allegory; but this Pandora was

made by Vulcan, only to avenge himself on Prometheus, who had stolen

fire to inform a man of clay.

The Indians have succeeded no better. God having created man, gave him a

drug which would insure him permanent health of body. The man loaded his

ass with the drug, and the ass being thirsty, the serpent directed him

to a fountain, and while the ass was drinking, purloined the drug.

The Syrians pretended that man and woman having been created in the

fourth heaven, they resolved to eat a cake in lieu of ambrosia, their

natural food. Ambrosia exhaled by the pores; but after eating cake, they

were obliged to relieve themselves in the usual manner. The man and the

woman requested an angel to direct them to a water-closet. Behold, said

the angel, that petty globe which is almost of no size at all; it is

situated about sixty millions of leagues from this place, and is the

privy of the universe--go there as quickly as you can. The man and woman

obeyed the angel and came here, where they have ever since remained;

since which time the world has been what we now find it. The Syrians

will eternally be asked why God allowed man to eat the cake and

experience such a crowd of formidable ills?

I pass with speed from the fourth heaven to Lord Bolingbroke. This

writer, who doubtless was a great genius, gave to the celebrated Pope

his plan of "all for the best," as it is found word for word in the

posthumous works of Lord Bolingbroke, and recorded by Lord Shaftesbury

in his "Characteristics." Read in Shaftesbury's chapter of the

"Moralists" the following passage:

"Much may be replied to these complaints of the defects of nature--How

came it so powerless and defective from the hands of a perfect

Being?--But I deny that it is defective. Beauty is the result

of contrast, and universal concord springs out of a perpetual

conflict.... It is necessary that everything be sacrificed to other

things--vegetables to animals, and animals to the earth.... The laws of

the central power of gravitation, which give to the celestial bodies

their weight and motion, are not to be deranged in consideration of a

pitiful animal, who, protected as he is by the same laws, will soon be

reduced to dust."

Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and Pope, their working artisan, resolve their

general question no better than the rest. Their "all for the best" says

no more than that all is governed by immutable laws; and who did not

know that? We learn nothing when we remark, after the manner of little

children, that flies are created to be eaten by spiders, spiders by

swallows, swallows by hawks, hawks by eagles, eagles by men, men by one

another, to afford food for worms; and at last, at the rate of about a

thousand to one, to be the prey of devils everlastingly.

There is a constant and regular order established among animals of all

kinds--a universal order. When a stone is formed in my bladder, the

mechanical process is admirable; sandy particles pass by small degrees

into my blood; they are filtered by the veins; and passing the urethra,

deposit themselves in my bladder; where, uniting agreeably to the

Newtonian attraction, a stone is formed, which gradually increases, and

I suffer pains a thousand times worse than death by the finest

arrangement in the world. A surgeon, perfect in the art of Tubal-Cain,

thrusts into me a sharp instrument; and cutting into the perineum,

seizes the stone with his pincers, which breaks during the endeavors, by

the necessary laws of mechanism; and owing to the same mechanism, I die

in frightful torments. All this is "for the best", being the evident

result of unalterable physical principles, agreeably to which I know as

well as you that I perish.

If we were insensitive, there would be nothing to say against this

system of physics; but this is not the point on which we treat. We ask

if there are not physical evils, and whence do they originate? There is

no absolute evil, says Pope in his "Essay on Man"; or if there are

particular evils, they compose a general good. It is a singular general

good which is composed of the stone and the gout--of all sorts of crime

and sufferings, and of death and damnation.

The fall of man is our plaister for all these particular maladies of

body and soul, which you call "the general health"; but Shaftesbury and

Bolingbroke have attacked original sin. Pope says nothing about it; but

it is clear that their system saps the foundations of the Christian

religion, and explains nothing at all.

In the meantime, this system has been since approved by many

theologians, who willingly embrace contradictions. Be it so; we ought to

leave to everybody the privilege of reasoning in their own way upon the

deluge of ills which overwhelm us. It would be as reasonable to prevent

incurable patients from eating what they please. "God," says Pope,

"beholds, with an equal eye, a hero perish or a sparrow fall; the

destruction of an atom, or the ruin of a thousand planets; the bursting

of a bubble, or the dissolution of a world."

This, I must confess, is a pleasant consolation. Who does not find a

comfort in the declaration of Lord Shaftesbury, who asserts, "that God

will not derange His general system for so miserable an animal as man?"

It must be confessed at least that this pitiful creature has a right to

cry out humbly, and to endeavor, while bemoaning himself, to understand

why these eternal laws do not comprehend the good of every individual.

This system of "all for the best" represents the Author of Nature as a

powerful and malevolent monarch, who cares not for the destruction of

four or five hundred thousand men, nor of the many more who in

consequence spend the rest of their days in penury and tears, provided

He succeeds in His designs.

Far therefore from the doctrine--that this is the best of all possible

worlds--being consolatory, it is a hopeless one to the philosophers who

embrace it. The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos

for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is a mere mental sport to

the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains. As to

unreasoning people, they resemble the fish which are transported from a

river to a reservoir, with no more suspicion that they are to be eaten

during the approaching Lent, than we have ourselves of the facts which

originate our destiny.

Let us place at the end of every chapter of metaphysics the two letters

used by the Roman judges when they did not understand a pleading. N.L.

_non liquet_--it is not clear. Let us, above all, silence the knaves

who, overloaded like ourselves with the weight of human calamities, add

the mischief of their calumny; let us refute their execrable imposture

by having recourse to faith and Providence.

Some reasoners are of opinion that it agrees not with the nature of the

Great Being of Beings for things to be otherwise than they are. It is a

rough system, and I am too ignorant to venture to examine it.

ORACLES.

SECTION I.

After the sect of the Pharisees among the Jews had become acquainted

with the devil, some reasoners among them began to entertain the idea

that the devil and his companions inspired, among all other nations, the

priests and statues that delivered oracles. The Sadducees had no belief

in such beings. They admitted neither angels nor demons. It appears that

they were more philosophic than the Pharisees, and consequently less

calculated to obtain influence and credit with the people.

The devil was the great agent with the Jewish populace in the time of

Gamaliel, John the Baptist, James Oblia, and Jesus his brother, who was

our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we perceive that the devil

transports Jesus sometimes into the wilderness, sometimes to the

pinnacle of the temple, and sometimes to a neighboring hill, from which

might be discovered all the kingdoms of the world; the devil takes

possession, when he pleases, of the persons of boys, girls, and animals.

The Christians, although mortal enemies of the Pharisees, adopted all

that the Pharisees had imagined of the devil; as the Jews had long

before introduced among themselves the customs and ceremonies of the

Egyptians. Nothing is so common as to imitate the practices of enemies,

and to use their weapons.

In a short time the fathers of the church ascribed to the devil all the

religions which divided the earth, all pretended prodigies, all great

events, comets, plagues, epilepsies, scrofula, etc. The poor devil, who

was supposed to be roasting in a hole under the earth, was perfectly

astonished to find himself master of the world. His power afterwards

increased wonderfully from the institution of monks.

The motto or device of all these newcomers was, "Give me money and I

will deliver you from the devil." But both the celestial and terrestrial

power of these gentry received at length a terrible check from the hand

of one of their own brotherhood, Luther, who, quarreling with them about

some beggarly trifle, disclosed to the world all the trick and villainy

of their mysteries. Hondorf, an eye-witness, tells us that the reformed

party having expelled the monks from a convent at Eisenach in Thuringia,

found in it a statue of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, contrived

with such art that, when offerings were placed upon the altar, the

Virgin and Child bent their heads in sign of grateful acknowledgment,

but turned their backs on those who presented themselves with empty

hands.

In England the case was much worse. When by order of Henry VIII., a

judicial visitation took place of all the convents, half of the nuns

were found in a state of pregnancy; and this, at least it may be

supposed, was not by the operation of the devil. Bishop Burnet relates

that in a hundred and forty-four convents the depositions taken by the

king's commissioners attested abominations which those of Sodom and

Gomorrah did not even approach. In fact, the English monks might

naturally be expected to be more dissolute than the inhabitants of

Sodom, as they were richer. They were in possession of the best lands in

the kingdom. The territory of Sodom and Gomorrah, on the contrary,

produced neither grain, fruit, nor pulse; and being moreover deficient

even in water fit to drink, could be neither more nor less than a

frightful desert, inhabited by miserable wretches too much occupied in

satisfying their absolute necessities to have much time to devote to

pleasures.

In short, these superb asylums of laziness having been suppressed by act

of parliament, all the instruments of their pious frauds were exposed in

the public places; the famous crucifix of Brocksley, which moved and

marched like a puppet; phials of a red liquid which was passed off for

blood shed by the statues of saints when they were dissatisfied with the

court; candlesticks of tinned iron, in which the lighted candles were

carefully placed so as to make the people believe they were the same

candles that were always burning; speaking tubes--_sarbacans_--which

communicated between the sacristy and the roof of the church, and by

which celestial voices were occasionally heard by apparently devotees,

who were paid for hearing them; in short, everything that was ever

invented by knavery to impose upon imbecility.

Many sensible persons who lived at this period, being perfectly

convinced that the monks, and not the devils, had employed all these

pious stratagems, began to entertain the idea that the case had been

very similar with the religions of antiquity; that all the oracles and

all the miracles so highly vaunted by ancient times had been merely the

tricks of charlatans; that the devil had never had anything to do with

such matters; and that the simple fact was, that the Greek, Roman,

Syrian, and Egyptian priests had been still more expert than our modern

monks.

The devil, therefore, thus lost much of his credit; insomuch that at

length the honest Bekker, whose article you may consult, wrote his

tiresome book against the devil, and proved by a hundred arguments that

he had no existence. The devil himself made no answer to him, but the

ministers of the holy gospel, as you have already seen, did answer him;

they punished the honest author for having divulged their secret, and

took away his living; so that Bekker fell a victim to the nullity of

Beelzebub.

It was the lot of Holland to produce the most formidable enemies of the

devil. The physician Van Dale--a humane philosopher, a man of profound

learning, a most charitable citizen, and one whose naturally bold mind

became proportionately bolder, in consequence of his intrepidity being

founded on virtue--undertook at length the task of enlightening mankind,

always enslaved by ancient errors, and always spreading the bandage that

covers their eyes, until at last some powerful flash of light discovers

to them a corner of truth of which the greater number are completely

unworthy. He proved, in a work abounding in the most recondite learning,

that the devils had never delivered a single oracle, had never performed

a single prodigy, and had never mingled in human affairs at all; and

that there never had in reality been any demons but those impostors who

had deceived their fellow men. The devil should never ridicule or

despise a sensible physician. Those who know something of nature are

very formidable enemies to all juggling performers of prodigies. If the

devil would be advised by me, he would always address himself to the

faculty of theology, and never to the faculty of medicine.

Van Dale proved, then, by numberless authorities, not merely that the

Pagan oracles were mere tricks of the priests, but that these knaveries,

consecrated all over the world, had not ceased at the time of John the

Baptist and Jesus Christ, as was piously and generally thought to be the

case. Nothing was more true, more clear, more decidedly demonstrated,

than this doctrine announced by the physician Van Dale; and there is no

man of education and respectability who now calls it in question.

The work of Van Dale is not, perhaps, very methodical, but it is one of

the most curious works that ever came from the press. For, from the

gross forgeries of the pretended Histape and the Sibyls; from the

apocryphal history of the voyage of Simon Barjonas to Rome, and the

compliments which Simon the magician sent him through the medium of his

dog; from the miracles of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, and especially the

letter which that saint wrote to the devil, and which was safely

delivered according to its address, down to the miracles of the reverend

fathers, the Jesuits, and the reverend fathers, the Capuchins, nothing

is forgotten. The empire of imposture and stupidity is completely

developed before the eyes of all who can read; but they, alas! are only

a small number.

Far indeed was that empire, at that period, from being destroyed in

Italy, France, Spain, the states of Austria, and more especially in

Poland, where the Jesuits then bore absolute sway. Diabolical

possessions and false miracles still inundated one-half of besotted and

barbarized Europe. The following account is given by Van Dale of a

singular oracle that was delivered in his time at Terni, in the States

of the Pope, about the year 1650; and the narrative of which was printed

at Venice by order of the government:

A hermit of the name of Pasquale, having heard that Jacovello, a citizen

of Terni, was very covetous and rich, came to Terni to offer up his

devotions in the church frequented by the opulent miser, soon formed an

acquaintance with him, flattered him in his ruling passion, and

persuaded him that it was a service highly acceptable to God to take as

much care as possible of money; it was indeed expressly enjoined in the

gospel, as the negligent servant who had not put out his lord's money to

interest at five hundred per cent was thrown into outer darkness.

In the conversations which the hermit had with Jacovello, he frequently

entertained him with plausible discourses held by crucifixes and by a

quantity of Italian Virgin Marys. Jacovello agreed that the statues of

saints sometimes spoke to men, and told him that he should believe

himself one of the elect if ever he could have the happiness to hear the

image of a saint speak.

The friendly Pasquale replied that he had some hope he might be able to

give him that satisfaction in a very little time; that he expected every

day from Rome a death's head, which the pope had presented to one of his

brother hermits; and that this head spoke quite as distinctly and

sensibly as the trees of Dodona, or even the ass of Balaam. He showed

him the identical head, in fact, four days after this conversation. He

requested of Jacovello the key of a small cave and an inner chamber,

that no person might possibly be a witness of the awful mystery. The

hermit, having introduced a tube from this cave into the head, and made

every other suitable arrangement, went to prayer with his friend

Jacovello, and the head at that moment uttered the following words:

"Jacovello, I will recompense thy zeal. I announce to thee a treasure of

a hundred thousand crowns under a yew tree in thy garden. But thou shalt

die by a sudden death if thou makest any attempt to obtain this treasure

until thou hast produced before me a pot containing coin amounting to

ten gold marks."

Jacovello ran speedily to his coffers and placed before the oracle a pot

containing the ten marks. The good hermit had had the precaution to

procure a similar vessel which he had filled with sand, and he

dexterously substituted that for the pot of Jacovello, on his turning

his back, and then left the pious miser with one death's head more, and

ten gold marks less, than he had before. Nearly such is the way in which

all oracles have been delivered, beginning with those of Jupiter Ammon,

and ending with that of Trophonius.

One of the secrets of the priests of antiquity, as it is of our own, was

confession in the mysteries. It was by this that they gained correct and

particular information about the affairs of families, and qualified

themselves in a great measure to give pertinent and suitable replies to

those who came to consult them. To this subject applies the anecdote

which Plutarch has rendered so celebrated. A priest once urging an

initiated person to confession, that person said: "To whom should I

confess?" "To God," replied the priest. "Begone then, man," said the

desired penitent; "begone, and leave me alone with God."

[Illustration: The Initial Banishing of the Priest.--Begone and leave me

alone with God.]

It would be almost endless to recount all the interesting facts and

narratives with which Van Dale has enriched his book. Fontenelle did not

translate it. But he extracted from it what he thought would be most

suitable to his countrymen, who love sprightly anecdote and observation

better than profound knowledge. He was eagerly read by what in France is

called good company; and Van Dale, who had written in Latin and Greek,

had been read only by the learned. The rough diamond of Van Dale shone

with exquisite brilliancy after the cutting and polish of Fontenelle:

the success of the work was such that the fanatics became alarmed.

Notwithstanding all Fontenelle's endeavors to soften down the

expressions of Van Dale, and his explaining himself sometimes with the

license of a Norman, he was too well understood by the monks, who never

like to be told that their brethren have been impostors.

A certain Jesuit of the name of Baltus, born near Messina, one of that

description of learned persons who know how to consult old books, and to

falsify and cite them, although after all nothing to the purpose, took

the part of the devil against Van Dale and Fontenelle. The devil could

not have chosen a more tiresome and wretched advocate; his name is now

known solely from the honor he had of writing against two celebrated men

who advocated a good cause.

Baltus likewise, in his capacity of Jesuit, caballed with no little

perseverance and bitterness on the occasion, in union with his brethren,

who at that time were as high in credit and influence as they have since

been plunged deep in ignominy. The Jansenists, on their part, more

impassionate and exasperated than even the Jesuits, clamored in a still

louder tone than they did. In short, all the fanatics were convinced

that it would be all over with the Christian religion, if the devil were

not supported in his rights.

In the course of time the books of Jansenists and Jesuits have all sunk

into oblivion. That of Van Dale still remains for men of learning, and

that of Fontenelle for men of wit. With respect to the devil, he

resembles both Jesuits and Jansenists, and is losing credit from day to

day.

SECTION II.

Some curious and surprising histories of oracles, which it was thought

could be ascribed only to the power of genii, made the Christians think

they were delivered by demons, and that they had ceased at the coming of

Christ. They were thus enabled to save the time and trouble that would

have been required by an investigation of the facts; and they thought to

strengthen the religion which informed them of the existence of demons

by referring to those beings such events.

The histories however that were circulated on the subject of oracles are

exceedingly suspicious. That of Thamus, to which Eusebius gives credit,

and which Plutarch alone relates, is followed in the same history by

another story so ridiculous, that that would be sufficient to throw

discredit upon it; but it is, besides, incapable of any reasonable

interpretation. If this great Pan were a demon, can we suppose the

demons incapable of communicating the event of his death to one another

without employing Thamus about it? If the great Pan were Jesus Christ,

how came it that not a single Pagan was undeceived with respect to his

religion, and converted to the belief that this same Pan was in fact

Jesus Christ who died in Judæa, if God Himself compelled the demons to

announce this death to the pagans?

The history of Thulis, whose oracle is clear and positive on the subject

of the Trinity, is related only by Suidas. This Thulis, king of Egypt,

was not certainly one of the Ptolemies. What becomes of the whole oracle

of Serapis, when it is ascertained that Herodotus does not speak of that

god, while Tacitus relates at length how and why one of the Ptolemies

brought the god Serapis from Pontus, where he had only until then been

known?

The oracle delivered to Augustus about the Hebrew infant who should be

obeyed by all the gods, is absolutely inadmissible. Cedrenus quotes it

from Eusebius, but it is not now to be found in him. It certainly is not

impossible that Cedrenus quotes it from Eusebius, but it is not now to

be found in him. It certainly is not impossible that Cedrenus may have

made a false quotation, or have quoted a work falsely ascribed to

Eusebius; but how is it to be accounted for, that all the early

apologists for Christianity should have preserved complete silence with

respect to an oracle so favorable to their religion?

The oracles which Eusebius relates from Porphyry, who was attached to

paganism, are not of a more embarrassing nature than those just noticed.

He gives them to us stripped of all the accompanying circumstances that

attended them in the writings of Porphyry. How do we know whether that

pagan did not refute them. For the interest of his cause it would

naturally have been an object for him to do so; and if he did not do it,

most assuredly it was from some concealed motive, such, for instance, as

presenting them to the Christians only for an occasion to prove and

deride their credulity, if they should really receive them as true and

rest their religion on such weak foundations.

Besides, some of the ancient Christians reproached the pagans with being

the dupes of their priests. Observe how Clement of Alexandria speaks of

them: "Boast as long as you please of your childish and impertinent

oracles, whether of Claros or the Pythian Apollo, of Dindymus or

Amphilocus; and add to these your augurs and interpreters of dreams and

prodigies. Bring forward also those clever gentry who, in the presence

of the mighty Pythian Apollo, effect their divinations through the

medium of meal or barley, and those also who, by a certain talent of

ventriloquism, have obtained such high reputation. Let the secrets of

the Egyptian temples, and the necromancy of the Etruscans, remain in

darkness; all these things are most certainly nothing more than decided

impostures, as completely tricks as those of a juggler with his cups and

balls. The goats carefully trained for the divination, the ravens

elaborately instructed to deliver the oracles, are--if we may use the

expression--merely accomplices of the charlatans by whom the whole world

has thus been cheated."

Eusebius, in his turn, displays a number of excellent reasons to prove

that oracles could be nothing but impostures; and if he attributes them

to demons, it is the result of deplorable prejudices or of an affected

respect for general opinion. The pagans would never admit that their

oracles were merely the artifices of their priests; it was imagined

therefore, by rather an awkward process of reasoning, that a little was

gained in the dispute by admitting the possibility, that there might be

something supernatural in their oracles, and insisting at the same time,

that if there were, it was the operation, not of the deity, but of

demons.

It is no longer necessary now, in order to expose the finesse and

stratagems of priests, to resort to means which might themselves appear

too strongly marked by those qualities. A time has already been when

they were completely exhibited to the eyes of the whole world--the time,

I mean when the Christian religion proudly triumphed over paganism under

Christian emperors.

Theodoret says that Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, exhibited to the

inhabitants of that city the hollow statues into which the priests

entered, from secret passages, to deliver the oracles. When, by

Constantine's order, the temple of Æsculapius at Ægea, in Cilicia, was

pulled down, there was driven out of it, says Eusebius in his life of

that emperor, not a god, nor a demon, but the human impostor who had so

long duped the credulity of nations. To this he adds the general

observation that, in the statues of the gods that were thrown down, not

the slightest appearance was found of gods, or demons, or even any

wretched and gloomy spectres, but only hay, straw, or the bones of the

dead.

The greatest difficulty respecting oracles is surmounted, when it is

ascertained and admitted, that demons had no concern with them. There is

no longer any reason why they should cease precisely at the coming of

Jesus Christ. And moreover, there are many proofs that oracles continued

more than four hundred years after Jesus Christ, and that they were not

totally silenced but by the total destruction of paganism.

Suetonius, in the life of Nero, says the oracle of Delphi warned that

emperor to be aware of seventy-three years, and that Nero concluded he

was to die at that age, never thinking upon old Galba, who, at the age

of seventy-three, deprived him of the empire.

Philostratus, in his life of Apollonius of Tyana, who saw Domitian,

informs us that Apollonius visited all the oracles of Greece, and that

of Dodona, and that of Delphos; and that of Amphiaraus. Plutarch, who

lived under Trajan, tells us that the oracles of Delphos still

subsisted, although there was then only one priestess, instead of two or

three. Under Adrian, Dion Chrysostom relates that he consulted the

oracle of Delphos; he obtained from it an answer which appeared to him

not a little perplexed, and which in fact was so.

Under the Antonines, Lucian asserts that a priest of Tyana went to

inquire of the false prophet Alexander, whether the oracles which were

then delivered at Dindymus, Claros, and Delphos, were really answers of

Apollo, or impostures? Alexander had some fellow-feeling for these

oracles, which were of a similar description to his own, and replied to

the priest, that that was not permitted to be known; but when the same

wise inquirer asked what he should be after his death, he was boldly

answered, "You will be a camel, then a horse, afterwards a philosopher,

and at length a prophet as great as Alexander."

After the Antonines, three emperors contended for the empire. The oracle

of Delphos was consulted, says Spartian, to ascertain which of the three

the republic might expect as its head. The oracle answered in a single

verse to the following purport: The black is better; the African is

good; the white is the worst. By the black was understood Pescennius

Niger; by the African, Severus Septimus, who was from Africa; and by the

white, Claudius Albinus.

Dion, who did not conclude his history before the eighth year of

Alexander Severus, that is, the year 230, relates that in his time

Amphilocus still delivered oracles in dreams. He informs us also, that

there was in the city of Apollonia an oracle which declared future

events by the manner in which the fire caught and consumed the incense

thrown upon an altar.

Under Aurelian, about the year 272, the people of Palmyra, having

revolted, consulted an oracle of Sarpedonian Apollo in Cilicia; they

again consulted that of the Aphacian Venus. Licinus, according to the

account of Sozomen, designing to renew the war against Constantine,

consulted the oracle of Apollo of Dindymus, and received from it in

answer two verses of Homer, of which the sense is--Unhappy old man, it

becomes not you to combat with the young! you have no strength, and are

sinking under the weight of age.

A certain god, scarcely if at all known, of the name of Besa, if we may

credit Ammianus Marcellinus, still delivered oracles on billets at

Abydos, in the extremity of the Thebais, under the reign of Constantius.

Finally, Macrobius, who lived under Arcadius and Honorius, sons of

Theodosius, speaks of the god of Heliopolis of Syria and his oracle, and

of the fortunes of Antium, in terms which distinctly imply that they all

still subsisted in his time.

We may observe that it is not of the slightest consequence whether these

histories are true or whether the oracles in fact delivered the answers

attributed to them; it is completely sufficient for the purpose that

false answers could be attributed only to oracles which were in fact

known still to subsist; and the histories which so many authors have

published clearly prove that they did not cease but with the cessation

of paganism itself.

Constantine pulled down but few temples, nor indeed could he venture to

pull them down but on a pretext of crimes committed in them. It was on

this ground that he ordered the demolition of those of the Aphacian

Venus, and of Æsculapius which was at Ægea in Cilicia, both of them

temples in which oracles were delivered. But he forbade sacrifices to

the gods, and by that edict began to render temples useless.

Many oracles still subsisted when Julian assumed the reins of empire. He

re-established some that were in a state of ruin; and he was even

desirous of being the prophet of that of Dindymus. Jovian, his

successor, began his reign with great zeal for the destruction of

paganism; but in the short space of seven months, which comprised the

whole time he reigned, he was unable to make any great progress.

Theodosius, in order to attain the same object, ordered all the temples

of the pagans to be shut up. At last, the exercise of that religion was

prohibited under pain of death by an edict of the emperors Valentinian

and Marcian, in the year 451 of the vulgar era; and the destruction of

paganism necessarily involved that of oracles.

This conclusion has nothing in it surprising or extraordinary: it is the

natural consequence of the establishment of a new worship. Miraculous

facts, or rather what it is desired should be considered as such,

diminish in a false religion, either in proportion as it becomes firmly

established and has no longer occasion for them, or in proportion as it

gradually becomes weaker and weaker, because they no longer obtain

credit. The ardent but useless desire to pry into futurity gave birth to

oracles; imposture encouraged and sanctioned them; and fanaticism set

the seal; for an infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade

before you instruct. The poverty of the people, who had no longer

anything left them to give; the imposture detected in many oracles, and

thence naturally concluded to exist in all; and finally the edicts of

the Christian emperors; such are the real causes of the establishment,

and of the cessation, of this species of imposture. The introduction of

an opposite state of circumstances into human affairs made it completely

disappear; and oracles thus became involved in the vicissitudes

accompanying all human institutions.

Some limit themselves to observing that the birth of Jesus Christ is the

first epoch of the cessation of oracles. But why, on such an occasion,

should some demons have fled, while others remained? Besides, ancient

history proves decidedly that many oracles had been destroyed before

this birth. All the distinguished oracles of Greece no longer existed,

or scarcely existed, and the oracle was occasionally interrupted by the

silence of an honest priest who would not consent to deceive the people.

"The oracle of Delphi," says Lucian, "remains dumb since princes have

become afraid of futurity; they have prohibited the gods from speaking,

and the gods have obeyed them."

ORDEAL.

It might be imagined that all the absurdities which degrade human nature

were destined to come to us from Asia, the source at the same time of

all the sciences and arts! It was in Asia and in Egypt that mankind

first dared to make the life or death of a person accused, dependent on

the throw of a die, or something equally unconnected with reason and

decided by chance--on cold water or hot water, on red hot iron, or a bit

of barley bread. Similar superstition, we are assured by travellers,

still exists in the Indies, on the coast of Malabar, and in Japan.

This superstition passed from Egypt into Greece. There was a very

celebrated temple at Trezène in which every man who perjured himself

died instantly of apoplexy. Hippolytus, in the tragedy of "Phædra," in

the first scene of the fifth act, addresses the following lines to his

mistress Aricia:

_Aux portes de Trezène, et parmi ces tombeaux,_

_Des princes de ma race antiques sepultures,_

_Est un temple sacré formidable aux parjures._

_C'est là que les mortels n'osent jurer en vain;_

_Le perfide y reçoit un châtiment soudain;_

_Et, craignant d'y trouver la mort inévitable,_

_Le mensonge n'a point de frem plus redoubtable._

At Trezène's gates, amidst the ancient tombs

In which repose the princes of my race,

A sacred temple stands, the perjurer's dread.

No daring mortal there may falsely swear,

For swift the vengeance which pursues his crime,

Inevitable death his instant lot;

Nowhere has falsehood a more awful curb.

The learned commentator of the great Racine makes the following remark

on these Trezenian proofs or ordeals:

"M. de la Motte has remarked that Hippolytus should have proposed to his

father to come and hear his justification in this temple, where no one

dared venture on swearing to a falsehood. It is certain, that in such a

case Theseus could not have doubted the innocence of that young prince;

but he had received too convincing evidence against the virtue of

Phædra, and Hippolytus was not inclined to make the experiment. M. de la

Motte would have done well to have distrusted his own good taste, when

he suspected that of Racine, who appears to have foreseen the objection

here made. In fact, Theseus is so prejudiced against Hippolytus that he

will not even permit him to justify himself by an oath."

I should observe that the criticism of La Motte was originally made by

the deceased marquis de Lassai. He delivered it at M. de la Faye's, at a

dinner party at which I was present together with the late M. de la

Motte, who promised to make use of it; and, in fact, in his "Discourses

upon Tragedy," he gives the honor of the criticism to the marquis de

Lassai. The remark appeared to me particularly judicious, as well as to

M. de la Faye and to all the guests present, who--of course excepting

myself--were the most able critics in Paris. But we all agreed that

Aricia was the person who should have called upon Theseus to try the

accused by the ordeal of the Trezenian temple; and so much the more so,

as Theseus immediately after talks for a long time together to that

princess, who forgets the only thing that could clear up the doubts of

the father and vindicate the son. The commentator in vain objects that

Theseus has declared to his son he will not believe his oaths:

Toujours les scélérats ont recours au parjure.

--_Phedra._ Act iv., scene 2.

The wicked always have recourse to oaths.

There is a prodigious difference between an oath taken in a common

apartment, and an oath taken in a temple where the perjured are punished

by sudden death. Had Aricia said but a single word on the subject,

Theseus could have had no excuse for not conducting Hippolytus to this

temple; but, in that case, what would have become of the catastrophe?

Hippolytus, then, should not have mentioned at all the appalling power

of the temple of Trezène to his beloved Aricia; he had no need whatever

to take an oath of his love to her, for of that she was already most

fully persuaded. In short, his doing so is an inadvertence, a small

fault, which escaped the most ingenious, elegant, and impassioned

tragedian that we ever had.

From this digression, I return to the barbarous madness of ordeals. They

were not admitted in the Roman republic. We cannot consider as of one of

these ordeals, the usage by which the most important enterprises were

made to depend upon the manner in which the sacred pullets ate their

vetches. We are here considering only ordeals applied to ascertain the

guilt or innocence of men. It was never proposed to the Manliuses,

Camilluses, or Scipios, to prove their innocence by plunging their hands

into boiling water without its scalding them.

These suggestions of folly and barbarism were not admitted under the

emperors. But the Tartars who came to destroy the empire--for the

greater part of these plunderers issued originally from Tartary--filled

our quarter of the world with their ridiculous and cruel jurisprudence,

which they derived from the Persians. It was not known in the Eastern

Empire till the time of Justinian, notwithstanding the detestable

superstition which prevailed in it. But from that time the ordeals we

are speaking of were received. This manner of trying men is so ancient

that we find it established among the Jews in all periods of their

history.

Korah, Dathan, and Abiram dispute the pontificate with the high priest

Aaron in the wilderness; Moses commands them to bring him two hundred

and fifty censors, and says to them: Let God choose between their

censors and that of Aaron. Scarcely had the revolted made their

appearance in order to submit to this ordeal, before they were swallowed

up by the earth, and fire from heaven struck two hundred and fifty of

their principal adherents; after which, the Lord destroyed fourteen

thousand seven hundred more men of that party. The quarrel however for

the priesthood still continued between the chiefs of Israel and Aaron.

The ordeal of rods was then employed; each man presented his rod, and

that of Aaron was the only one which budded.

Although the people of God had levelled the walls of Jericho by the

sound of trumpets, they were overcome by the inhabitants of Ai. This

defeat did not appear at all natural to Joshua; he consulted the Lord,

who answered that Israel had sinned; that some one had appropriated to

his own use a part of the plunder that had been taken at Jericho, and

there devoted as accursed. In fact, all ought to have been burned,

together with the men and women, children and cattle, and whoever had

preserved and carried off any part was to be exterminated. Joshua, in

order to discover the offender, subjected all the tribes to the trial by

lot. The lot first fell on the tribe of Judah, then on the family of

Zarah, then on the house of Zabdi, and finally on the grandson of Zabdi,

whose name was Acham.

Scripture does not explain how it was that these wandering tribes came

to have houses; neither does it inform us what kind of lots were made

use of on the occasion; but it is clear from the text, that Acham, being

convicted of stealing a small wedge of gold, a scarlet mantle, and two

hundred shekels of silver, was burned to death in the valley of Achor,

together with his sons, his sheep, his oxen, and his asses; and even his

very tent was burned with him.

The promised land was divided by lot; lots were drawn respecting the two

goats of expiation which should be sacrificed to the Lord, and which

should go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. When Saul was to be

chosen king, lots were consulted, and the lot fell on the tribe of

Benjamin, on the family of Metri belonging to that tribe, and finally on

Saul, the son of Kish, in the family of Metri.

The lot fell on Jonathan to be punished for having eaten some honey at

the end of a rod. The sailors of Joppa drew lots to learn from God what

was the cause of the tempest. The lot informed them that it was Jonah;

and they threw him into the sea.

All these ordeals by lot, which among other nations were merely profane

superstitions, were the voice of God Himself when employed by His

cherished and beloved people; and so completely and decidedly the voice

of God that even the apostles filled the place of the apostle Judas by

lot. The two candidates for the succession were Matthias and Barnabas.

Providence declared in favor of St. Matthias.

Pope Honorius, the third of that name, forbade by a decretal from that

time forward the method of choosing bishops by lot. Deciding by lots was

a very common practice, and was called by the pagans, "_sortilegium._"

Cato, in the "Pharsalia," says, "_Sortilegis egeant dubil...._"

There were other ordeals among the Jews in the name of the Lord; as, for

example, the waters of jealousy. A woman suspected of adultery was

obliged to drink of that water mixed with ashes, and consecrated by the

high priest. If she was guilty she instantly swelled and died. It is

upon the foundation of this law that the whole Christian world in the

West established oracles for persons under juridical accusation, not

considering that what was ordained even by God Himself in the Old

Testament was nothing more or less than an absurd superstition in the

New.

Duel by wager of battle was one of those ordeals, and lasted down to the

sixteenth century. He who killed his adversary was always in the right.

The most dreadful of all these curious and barbarous ordeals, was that

of a man's carrying a bar of red-hot iron to the distance of nine paces

without burning himself. Accordingly, the history of the middle ages,

fabulous as it is, does not record any instance of this ordeal, nor of

that which consisted in walking over nine burning ploughshares. All the

others might be doubted, or the deceptions and tricks employed in

relation to them to deceive the judges might be easily explained. It was

very easy, for example, to appear to pass through the trial of boiling

water without injury; a vessel might be produced half full of cold

water, into which the judicial boiling water might be put; and the

accused might safely plunge his arm up to the elbow in the lukewarm

mixture, and take up from the bottom the sacred blessed ring that had

been thrown into it for that purpose.

Oil might be made to boil with water; the oil begins to rise and appears

to boil when the water begins to simmer, and the oil at that time has

acquired but a small degree of heat. In such circumstances, a man seems

to plunge his hand into boiling water; but, in fact, moistens it with

the harmless oil, which preserves it from contact with and injury by the

water.

A champion may easily, by degrees, harden and habituate himself to

holding, for a few seconds, a ring that has been thrown into the fire,

without any very striking or painful marks of burning. To pass between

two fires without being scorched is no very extraordinary proof of skill

or address, when the movement is made with great rapidity and the face

and hands are well rubbed with ointment. It is thus that the formidable

Peter Aldobrandini, or "The Fiery Peter," as he was called, used to

manage--if there is any truth in his history--when he passed between two

blazing fires at Florence, in order to demonstrate, with God's help,

that his archbishop was a knave and debauchee. O, charlatans!

charlatans! henceforth disappear forever from the pages of history!

There existed a rather ludicrous ordeal, which consisted in making an

accused person try to swallow a piece of barley bread, which it was

believed would certainly choke him if he were guilty. I am not, however,

so much diverted with this case as with the conduct of Harlequin, when

the judge interrogated him concerning a robbery of which Dr. Balouard

accused him. The judge was sitting at table, and drinking some excellent

wine at the time, when Harlequin was brought in; perceiving which, the

latter takes up the bottle, and, pouring the whole of its contents into

a glass, swallows it at a draught, saying to the doctor: "If I am guilty

of what you accuse me, sir, I hope this wine will prove poison to me."

ORDINATION.

If a soldier, charged by the king of France with the honor of conferring

the order of St. Louis upon another soldier, had not, when presenting

the latter with the cross, the intention of making him a knight of that

order, would the receiver of the badge be on that account the less a

member of the order than if such intention had existed? Certainly not.

How was it, then, that many priests thought it necessary to be

re-ordained after the death of the celebrated Lavardin, bishop of Mans?

That singular prelate, who had instituted the order of "Good

Fellows"--Des Coteaux--bethought himself on his deathbed of a singular

trick, in the way of revenge, on a class of persons who had much annoyed

him. He was well known as one of the most daring freethinkers of the age

of Louis XIV., and had been publicly upbraided with his infidel

sentiments, by many of those on whom he had conferred orders of

priesthood. It is natural at the approach of death, for a sensitive and

apprehensive soul to revert to the religion of its early years. Decency

alone would have required of the bishop, that at least at his death he

should give an example of edification to the flock to which he had given

so much scandal by his life. But he was so deeply exasperated against

his clergy, as to declare, that not a single individual of those whom he

had himself ordained was really and truly a priest; that all their acts

in the capacity of priests were null and void; and that he never

entertained the intention of conferring any sacrament.

Such reasoning seems certainly characteristic, and just such as might be

expected from a drunken man; the priests of Mans might have replied to

him, "It is not your intention that is of any consequence, but ours. We

had an ardent and determined desire to be priests; we did all in our

power to become such. We are perfectly ingenuous and sincere; if you are

not so, that is nothing at all to us." The maxim applicable to the

occasion is, "_quic quid accipitur ad modum recipientis accipitur,_" and

not "_ad modum dantis._" "When our wine merchant has sold us a half a

hogshead of wine, we drink it, although he might have a secret intention

to hinder us from drinking it; we shall still be priests in spite of

your testament."

Those reasons were sound and satisfactory. However, the greater number

of those who had been ordained by that bishop did not consider

themselves as real and authorized priests, and subjected themselves to

ordination a second time. Mascaron, a man of moderate talents, but of

great celebrity as a preacher, persuaded them, both by his discourses

and example, to have the ceremony repeated. The affair occasioned great

scandal at Mans, and Paris, and Versailles; but like everything else was

soon forgotten.

ORIGINAL SIN.

SECTION I.

This is a subject on which the Socinians or Unitarians take occasion to

exult and triumph. They denominate this foundation of Christianity its

"original sin." It is an insult to God, they say; it is accusing Him of

the most absurd barbarity to have the hardihood to assert, that He

formed all the successive generations of mankind to deliver them over to

eternal tortures, under the pretext of their original ancestor having

eaten of a particular fruit in a garden. This sacrilegious imputation is

so much the more inexcusable among Christians, as there is not a single

word respecting this same invention of original sin, either in the

Pentateuch, or in the prophets, or the gospels, whether apocryphal or

canonical, or in any of the writers who are called the "first fathers of

the Church."

It is not even related in the Book of Genesis that God condemned Adam to

death for eating an apple. God says to him, indeed, "in the day that

thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." But the very same Book of

Genesis makes Adam live nine hundred and thirty years after indulging in

this criminal repast. The animals, the plants, which had not partaken of

this fruit, died at the respective periods prescribed for them by

nature. Man is evidently born to die, like all the rest.

Moreover, the punishment of Adam was never, in any way, introduced into

the Jewish law. Adam was no more a Jew than he was a Persian or

Chaldæan. The first chapters of Genesis--at whatever period they were

composed--were regarded by all the learned Jews as an allegory, and even

as a fable not a little dangerous, since that book was forbidden to be

read by any before they had attained the age of twenty-one.

In a word, the Jews knew no more about original sin than they did about

the Chinese ceremonies; and, although divines generally discover in the

Scripture everything they wish to find there, either "_totidem verbis,_"

or "_totidem literis,_" we may safely assert that no reasonable divine

will ever discover in it this surprising and overwhelming mystery.

We admit that St. Augustine was the first who brought this strange

notion into credit; a notion worthy of the warm and romantic brain of an

African debauchee and penitent, Manichæan and Christian, tolerant and

persecuting--who passed his life in perpetual self-contradiction.

What an abomination, exclaim the strict Unitarians, so atrociously to

calumniate the Author of Nature as even to impute to Him perpetual

miracles, in order that He may damn to all eternity the unhappy race of

mankind, whom he introduces into the present life only for so short a

span! Either He created souls from all eternity, upon which system, as

they must be infinitely more ancient than the sin of Adam, they can have

no possible connection with it; or these souls are formed whenever man

and woman sexually associate; in which case the Supreme Being must be

supposed continually watching for all the various associations of this

nature that take place, to create spirits that He will render eternally

miserable; or, finally, God is Himself the soul of all mankind, and upon

this system damns Himself. Which of these three suppositions is the most

absurd and abominable? There is no fourth. For the opinion that God

waits six weeks before He creates a damned soul in a fœtus is, in fact,

no other than that which creates it at the moment of sexual connection:

the difference of six weeks cannot be of the slightest consequence in

the argument. I have merely related the opinion of the Unitarians; but

men have now attained such a degree of superstition that I can scarcely

relate it without trembling.

SECTION II.

It must be acknowledged that we are not acquainted with any father of

the Church before St. Augustine and St. Jerome, who taught the doctrine

of original sin. St. Clement of Alexandria, notwithstanding his profound

knowledge of antiquity, far from speaking in any one passage of his

works of that corruption which has infected the whole human race, and

rendered it guilty from its birth, says in express words, "What evil can

a new-born infant commit? How could it possibly prevaricate? How could

such a being, which has, in fact, as yet done no one thing, fall under

the curse of Adam?"

And it is worth observing that he does not employ this language in order

to combat the rigid opinion of original sin, which was not at that time

developed, but merely to show that the passions, which are capable of

corrupting all mankind, have, as yet, taken no hold of this innocent

infant. He does not say: This creature of a day would not be damned if

it should now die, for no one had yet conjectured that it would be

damned. St. Clement could not combat a system absolutely unknown.

The great Origen is still more decisive than St. Clement of Alexandria.

He admits, indeed, in his exposition of the Epistle of Paul to the

Romans, that sin entered into the world by Adam, but he maintains that

it is the inclination to sin that thus entered; that it is very easy to

commit evil, but that it is not on that account said, man will always

commit evil, and is guilty even as soon as he is born.

In short, original sin, in the time of Origen, consisted only in the

misfortune of resembling the first man by being liable to sin like him.

Baptism was a necessary ordinance; it was the seal of Christianity; it

washed away all sins; but no man had yet said, that it washed away those

which the subject of it had not committed. No one yet asserted that an

infant would be damned, and burned in everlasting flames, in consequence

of its dying within two minutes of its birth. And an unanswerable proof

on this point is, that a long period passed away before the practice of

baptizing infants became prevalent. Tertullian was averse to their being

baptized; but, on the persuasion that original sin--of which these poor

innocents could not possibly be guilty--would affect their reprobation,

and expose them to suffer boundless and endless torture, for a deed of

which it was impossible for them to have the slightest knowledge: to

refuse them the consecrated bath of baptism, would be wilfully

consigning them to eternal damnation. The souls of all the executioners

in the world, condensed into the very essence of ingenious cruelty,

could not have suggested a more execrable abomination.

In a word, it is an incontestable fact that Christians did not for a

certain period baptize their infants, and it is therefore equally

incontestable that they were very far from damning them.

This, however, is not all; Jesus Christ never said: "The infant that is

not baptized will be damned." He came on the contrary to expiate all

sins, to redeem mankind by His blood; therefore, infants could not be

damned. Infants would, of course, _a fortiori,_ and, preferably, enjoy

this privilege. Our divine Saviour never baptized any person. Paul

circumcised his disciple Timothy, but is nowhere said to have baptized

him.

In a word, during the two first centuries, the baptism of infants was

not customary; it was not believed, therefore, that infants would become

victims of the fault of Adam. At the end of four hundred years their

salvation was considered in danger, and great uncertainty and

apprehension existed on the subject.

In the fifth century appears Pelagius. He treated the opinion of

original sin as monstrous. According to him, this dogma, like all

others, was founded upon a mere ambiguity. God had said to Adam in the

garden: "In the day in which thou shalt eat of the tree of knowledge,

thou shalt die." But, he did not die; and God pardoned him. Why, then,

should He not spare His race to the thousandth generation? Why should He

consign to infinite and eternal torments the innocent infants whose

father He received back into forgiveness and favor?

Pelagius considered God, not merely as an absolute master, but as a

parent, who left His children at perfect liberty, and rewarded them

beyond their merits, and punished them less than their faults deserved.

The language used by him and his disciples was: "If all men are born

objects of the eternal wrath of that Being who confers on them life; if

they can possibly be guilty before they can even think, it is then a

fearful and execrable offence to give them being, and marriage is the

most atrocious of crimes. Marriage, on this system, is nothing more or

less than an emanation from the Manichæan principle of evil; and those

who engage in it, instead of adoring God, adore the devil."

Pelagius and his partisans propagated this doctrine in Africa, where the

reputation and influence of St. Augustine were unbounded. He had been a

Manichæan, and seemed to think himself called upon to enter the lists

against Pelagius. The latter was ill able to resist either Augustine or

Jerome; various points, however, were contested, and the dispute

proceeded so far that Augustine pronounced his sentence of damnation

upon all children born, or to be born, throughout the world, in the

following terms: "The Catholic faith teaches that all men are born so

guilty that even infants are certainly damned when they die without

having been regenerated in Jesus."

It would be but a wretched compliment of condolence to offer to a queen

of China, or Japan, or India, Scythia, or Gothia, who had just lost her

infant son to say: "Be comforted, madam; his highness the prince royal

is now in the clutches of five hundred devils, who turn him round and

round in a great furnace to all eternity, while his body rests embalmed

and in peace within the precincts of your palace."

The astonished and terrified queen inquires why these devils should

eternally roast her dear son, the prince royal. She is answered that the

reason of it is that his great-grandfather formerly ate of the fruit of

knowledge, in a garden. Form an idea, if possible, of the looks and

thoughts of the king, the queen, the whole council, and all the

beautiful ladies of the court!

The sentence of the African bishop appeared to some divines--for there

are some good souls to be found in every place and class--rather severe,

and was therefore mitigated by one Peter Chrysologus, or Peter

Golden-tongue, who invented a suburb to hell, called "limbo", where all

the little boys and girls that died before baptism might be disposed of.

It is a place in which these innocents vegetate without sensation; the

abode of apathy; the place that has been called "The paradise of fools."

We find this very expression in Milton. He places this paradise

somewhere near the moon!

_Explication Of Original Sin._

The difficulty is the same with respect to this substituted limbo as

with respect to hell. Why should these poor little wretches be placed in

this limbo? what had they done? how could their souls, which they had

not in their possession a single day, be guilty of a gormandizing that

merited a punishment of six thousand years?

St. Augustine, who damns them, assigns as a reason, that the souls of

all men being comprised in that of Adam, it is probable that they were

all accomplices. But, as the Church subsequently decided that souls are

not made before the bodies which they are to inhabit are originated,

that system falls to the ground, notwithstanding the celebrity of its

author.

Others said that original sin was transmitted from soul to soul, in the

way of emanation, and that one soul, derived from another, came into the

world with all the corruption of the mother-soul. This opinion was

condemned.

After the divines had done with the question, the philosophers tried at

it. Leibnitz, while sporting with his monads, amused himself with

collecting together in Adam all the human monads with their little

bodies of monads. This was going further than St. Augustine. But this

idea, which was worthy of Cyrano de Bergerac, met with very few to adopt

and defend it. Malebranche explains the matter by the influence of the

imagination on mothers. Eve's brain was so strongly inflamed with the

desire of eating the fruit that her children had the same desire; just

like the irresistibly authenticated case of the woman who, after having

seen a man racked, was brought to bed of a dislocated infant.

Nicole reduced the affair to "a certain inclination, a certain tendency

to concupiscence, which we have derived from our mothers. This

inclination is not an act; but it will one day become such." Well said,

Nicole; bravo! But, in the meantime, why am I to be damned? Nicole does

not even touch the difficulty, which consists in ascertaining how our

own souls, which have but recently been formed, can be fairly made

responsible for the fault of another soul that lived some thousands of

years ago.

What, my good friends, _ought_ to be said upon the subject? Nothing.

Accordingly, I do not give _my_ explication of the difficulty: I say not

a single word.

OVID.

Scholars have not failed to write volumes to inform us exactly to what

corner of the earth Ovidius Naso was banished by Octavius Cepias,

surnamed Augustus. All that we know of it is, that, born at Sulmo and

brought up at Rome, he passed ten years on the right shore of the

Danube, in the neighborhood of the Black Sea. Though he calls this land

barbarous, we must not fancy that it was a land of savages. There were

verses made there; Cotis, the petty king of a part of Thrace, made Getic

verses for Ovid. The Latin poet learned Getic, and also composed lines

in this language. It seems as if Greek poetry should have been

understood in the ancient country of Orpheus, but this country was then

peopled by nations from the North, who probably spoke a Tartar dialect,

a language approaching to the ancient Slavonian. Ovid seemed not

destined to make Tartar verses. The country of the Tomites, to which he

was banished, was a part of Mysia, a Roman province, between Mount Hemus

and the Danube. It is situated in forty-four and a half degrees north

latitude, like one of the finest climates of France; but the mountains

which are at the south, and the winds of the north and east, which blow

from the Euxine, the cold and dampness of the forests, and of the

Danube, rendered this country insupportable to a man born in Italy. Thus

Ovid did not live long, but died there at the age of sixty. He complains

in his "Elegies" of the climate, and not of the inhabitants. "_Quos ego,

cum loca sim vestra perosus, amo._"

These people crowned him with laurel, and gave him privileges, which

prevented him not from regretting Rome. It was a great instance of the

slavery of the Romans and of the extinction of all laws, when a man born

of an equestrian family, like Octavius, exiled a man of another

equestrian family, and when one citizen of Rome with one word sent

another among the Scythians. Before this time, it required a

"plebiscitum", a law of the nation, to deprive a Roman of his country.

Cicero, although banished by a cabal, had at least been exiled with the

forms of law.

The crime of Ovid was incontestably that of having seen something

shameful in the family of Octavius:

_Cur aliquid vidi, cur noxia lumina feci?_

Why saw I aught, or why discover crime?

The learned have not decided whether he had seen Augustus with a

prettier boy than Mannius, whom he said he would not have because he was

too ugly; whether he saw some page in the arms of the empress Livia,

whom this Augustus had espoused, while pregnant by another; whether he

had seen the said Augustus occupied with his daughter or granddaughter;

or, finally, whether he saw him doing something still worse, "_torva tu

entibus hircis?_" It is most probable that Ovid detected an incestuous

correspondence, as an author, almost contemporary, named Minutionus

Apuleius, says: "_Pulsum quoque in exilium quod Augusti incestum

vidisset._"

Octavius made a pretext of the innocent book of the "Art of Love," a

book very decently written, and in which there is not an obscene word,

to send a Roman knight to the Black Sea. The pretence was ridiculous.

How could Augustus, of whom we have still verses filled with

obscenities, banish Ovid for having several years before given to his

friends some copies of the "Art of Love"? How could he impudently

reproach Ovid for a work written with decorum, while he approved of

Horace, who lavishes allusions and phrases on the most infamous

prostitution, and who proposed girls and boys, maid servants and valets

indiscriminately? It is nothing less than impudence to blame Ovid and

tolerate Horace. It is clear that Octavius alleged a very insufficient

reason, because he dared not allude to the real one. One proof that it

related to some secret adventure of the sacred imperial family is that

the goat of Caprea--Tiberius, immortalized by medals for his

debaucheries; Tiberius, that monster of lust and dissimulation--did not

recall Ovid, who, rather than demand the favor from the author of the

proscriptions and the poisoner of Germanicus, remained on the shores of

the Danube.

If a Dutch, Polish, Swedish, English, or Venetian gentleman had by

chance seen a stadtholder, or a king of Great Britain, Sweden, or

Poland, or a doge of Venice, commit some great sin, even if it was not

by chance that he saw it; if he had even sought the occasion, and was so

indiscreet as to speak of it, this stadtholder, king, or doge could not

legally banish him.

We can reproach Ovid almost as much as Augustus and Tiberius for having

praised them. The eulogiums which he lavishes on them are so extravagant

that at present they would excite indignation if he had even given them

to legitimate princes, his benefactors, instead of to tyrants, and to

his tyrants in particular. You may be pardoned for praising a little too

much a prince who caresses you; but not for treating as a god one who

persecutes you. It would have been a hundred times better for him to

have embarked on the Black Sea and retired into Persia by the Palus

Mæotis, than to have written his "Tristia." He would have learned

Persian as easily as Getic, and might have forgotten the master of Rome

near the master of Ecbatana. Some strong minds will say that there was

still another part to take, which was to go secretly to Rome, address

himself to some relations of Brutus and Cassius, and get up a twelfth

conspiracy against Octavius; but that was not in elegiac taste.

Poetical panegyrics are strange things! It is very clear that Ovid

wished with all his heart, that some Brutus would deliver Rome from that

Augustus, to whom in his verses he wished immortality. I reproach Ovid

with his "Tristia" alone. Bayle forms his system on the philosophy of

chaos so ably exhibited in the commencement of the "Metamorphoses":

_Ante mare et terras, et quod tegit omnia cœlum,_

_Unus erat toto naturæ vultus in orbe._

Bayle thus translates these first lines: "Before there was a heaven, an

earth, and a sea, nature was all homogeneous." In Ovid it is, "The face

of nature was the same throughout the universe," which means not that

all was homogeneous, but heterogeneous--this assemblage of different

things appeared the same; "_unus vultus._" Bayle criticises chaos

throughout. Ovid, who in his verses is only the poet of the ancient

philosophy, says that things hard and soft, light and heavy, were mixed

together:

_Mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus._

--OVID'S Met., b. i., l. 20.

And this is the manner in which Bayle reasons against him: "There is

nothing more absurd than to suppose a chaos which had been homogeneous

from all eternity, though it had the elementary qualities, at least

those which we call alteratives, which are heat, cold, humidity, and

dryness, as those which we call matrices, which are lightness and

weight, the former the cause of upper motion, the latter of lower.

Matter of this nature cannot be homogeneous, and must necessarily

contain all sorts of heterogeneousness. Heat and cold, humidity and

dryness, cannot exist together, unless their action and reaction temper

and convert them into other qualities which assume the form of mixed

bodies; and as this temperament can be made according to innumerable

diversities of combinations, chaos must contain an incredible number of

compound species. The only manner of conceiving matter homogeneous is by

saying that the alterative qualities of the elements modify all the

molecules of matter in the same degree in such a way, that throughout

there is the same warmth, the same softness, the same odor, etc. But

this would be to destroy with one hand that which has been built up with

the other; it would be by a contradiction in terms to call chaos the

most regular, the most marvellous for its symmetry, and the most

admirable in its proportions that it is possible to conceive. I allow

that the taste of man approves of a diversified rather than of a regular

work; but our reason teaches us that the harmony of contrary qualities,

uniformly preserved throughout the universe, would be as admirable a

perfection as the unequal division of them which has succeeded chaos.

What knowledge and power would not the diffusion of this uniform harmony

throughout nature demand! It would not be sufficient to place in any

compound an equal quantity of all the four ingredients; of one there

must be more and of another less, according as their force is greater or

less for action or resistance; for we know that philosophers bestow

action and reaction in a different degree on the elementary qualities.

All would amount to an opinion that the power which metamorphosed chaos

has withdrawn it, not from a state of strife and confusion as is

pretended, but from a state of the most admirable harmony, which by the

adjustment of the equilibrium of contrary forces, retained it in a

repose equivalent to peace. It is certain, therefore, that if the poets

will insist on the homogeneity of chaos, they must erase all which they

have added concerning the wild confusion of contrary seeds, of the

undigested mass, and of the perpetual combat of conflicting principles.

"Passing over this contradiction we shall find sufficient subject for

opposing them in other particulars. Let us recommence the attack on

eternity. There is nothing more absurd than to admit, for an infinite

time, the mixture of the insensible particles of four elements; for as

soon as you suppose in them the activity of heat, the action and

reaction of the four primary qualities, and besides these, motion

towards the centre in the elements of earth and water, and towards the

circumference in those of fire and air, you establish a principle which

necessarily separates these four kinds of bodies, the one from the

other, and for which a definite period alone is necessary. Consider a

little, that which is denominated "the vial of the four elements". There

are put into it some small metallic particles, and then three liquids,

the one much lighter than the other. Shake these well together, and you

no longer discern any of these component parts singly; each is

confounded with the other. But leave your vial at rest for a short time,

and you will find every one of them resume its pristine situation. The

metallic particles will reassemble at the bottom of the vial, the

lightest liquid will rise to the top, and the others take their stations

according to their respective degrees of gravity. Thus a very short time

will suffice to restore them to the same relative situation which they

occupied before the vial was shaken. In this vial you behold the laws

which nature has given in this world to the four elements, and,

comparing the universe to this vial, we may conclude, that if the earth

reduced to powder had been mingled with the matter of the stars, and

with that of air and of water, in such a way as that the compound

exhibited none of the elements by themselves, all would have immediately

operated to disengage themselves, and at the end of a certain time, the

particles of earth would form one mass, those of fire another; and thus

of the others in proportion to the lightness or heaviness of each of

them."

I deny to Bayle, that the experiment of the vial infers a definite

period for the duration of chaos. I inform him, that by heavy and light

things, Ovid and the philosophers intended those which became so after

God had placed His hand on them. I say to him: "You take for granted

that nature arranged all, and bestowed weight upon herself. You must

begin by proving to me that gravity is an essential quality of matter, a

position which has never been proved." Descartes, in his romance has

pretended that body never became heavy until his vortices of subtle

matter began to push them from the centre. Newton, in his correct

philosophy, never says that gravitation or attraction is a quality

essential to matter. If Ovid had been able to divine the "Principia" of

Newton, he would have said: "Matter was neither heavy nor in motion in

my chaos; it was God who endowed it with these properties; my chaos

includes not the forces you imagine"--"_nec quidquam nisi pondus

iners;_" it was a powerless mass; "pondus" here signifies not weight but

mass.

Nothing could possess weight, before God bestowed on matter the

principle of gravitation. In whatever degree one body is impelled

towards the centre of another, would it be drawn or impelled by another,

if the Supreme Power had not bestowed upon it this inexplicable virtue?

Therefore Ovid will not only turn out a good philosopher but a passable

theologian.

You say: "A scholastic theologian will admit without difficulty, that if

the four elements had existed independently of God, with all the

properties which they now possess, they would have formed of themselves

the machine of the world, and have maintained it in the state which we

now behold. There are therefore two great faults in the doctrine of

chaos; the first of which is, that it takes away from God the creation

of matter, and the production of the qualities proper to air, fire,

earth, and water; the other, that after taking God away, He is made to

appear unnecessarily on the theatre of the world, in order to assign

their places to the four elements. Our modern philosophers, who have

rejected the faculties and the qualities of the peripatetician physics,

will find the same defects in the description of the chaos of Ovid; for

that which they call general laws of motion, mechanical principles,

modifications of matter, the form, situation, and arrangement of atoms,

comprehends nothing beyond the active and passive virtue of nature,

which the peripatetics understand by the alterative and formative

qualities of the four elements. Seeing, therefore, that, according to

the doctrine of this school, these four bodies, separated according to

their natural heaviness and lightness, form a principle which suffices

for all generation, the Cartesians, Gassendists, and other modern

philosophers, ought to maintain that the motion, situation, and form of

the particles of matter, are sufficient for the production of all

natural effects, without excepting even the general arrangement which

has placed the earth, the air, the water, and the stars where we see

them. Thus, the true cause of the world, and of the effect which it

produces, is not different from the cause which has bestowed motion on

particles of matter--whether at the same time that it assigned to each

atom a determinate figure, as the Gassendists assert, or that it has

only given to particles entirely cubic, an impulsion which, by the

duration of the motion according to certain laws, makes it ultimately

take all sorts of forms--which is the hypothesis of the Cartesians. Both

the one and the other consequently agree, that if matter had been,

before the generation of the present world, as Ovid describes, it would

have been capable of withdrawing itself from chaos by its own necessary

operation, without the assistance of God. Ovid may therefore be accused

of two oversights--having supposed, in the first place, that without the

assistance of the Divinity, matter possessed the seeds of every

compound, heat, motion, etc.; and in the second, that without the same

assistance it could extricate itself from confusion. This is to give at

once too much and too little to both God and matter; it is to pass over

assistance when most needed, and to demand it when no longer necessary."

Ovid may still reply: "You are wrong in supposing that my elements

originally possessed all the qualities which they possess at present.

They had no qualities; matter existed naked, unformed, and powerless;

and when I say, that in my chaos, heat was mingled with cold, and

dryness with humidity, I only employ these expressions to signify that

there was neither cold, nor heat, nor wet, nor dry, which are qualities

that God has placed in our sensations, and not in matter. I have not

made the mistakes of which you accuse me. Your Cartesians and your

Gassendists commit oversights with their atoms and their cubic

particles; and their imaginations deal as little in truth as my

"Metamorphoses". I prefer Daphne changed into a laurel, and Narcissus

into a flower, to subtile matter changed into suns, and denser matter

transformed into earth and water. I have given you fables for fables,

and your philosophers have given you fables for truth."

PARADISE.

There is no word whose meaning is more remote from its etymology. It is

well known that it originally meant a place planted with fruit trees;

and afterwards, the name was given to gardens planted with trees for

shade. Such, in distant antiquity, were those of Saana, near Eden, in

Arabia Felix, known long before the hordes of the Hebrews had invaded a

part of the territory of Palestine.

This word "paradise" is not celebrated among the Jews, except in the

Book of Genesis. Some Jewish canonical writers speak of gardens; but not

one of them has mentioned a word about the garden denominated the

"earthly paradise". How could it happen that no Jewish writer, no Jewish

prophet, or Jewish psalmodist, should have once cited that terrestrial

paradise which we are talking of every day of our lives? This is almost

incomprehensible. It has induced many daring critics to believe that

Genesis was not written till a very late period.

The Jews never took this orchard or plantation of trees--this garden,

whether of plants or flowers--for heaven. St. Luke is the first who uses

the word "paradise," as signifying heaven, when Jesus Christ says to the

good thief: "This day thou shalt be with Me in paradise."

The ancients gave the name of "heaven" to the clouds. That name would

not have been exactly appropriate, as the clouds actually touch the

earth by the vapors of which they are formed, and as heaven is a vague

word signifying an immense space in which exist innumerable suns,

planets, and comets, which has certainly but little resemblance to an

orchard.

St. Thomas says that there are three paradises--the terrestrial, the

celestial, and the spiritual. I do not, I acknowledge, perfectly

understand the difference between the spiritual and celestial. The

spiritual orchard is according to him, the beatific vision. But it is

precisely that which constitutes the celestial paradise, it is the

enjoyment of God Himself. I do not presume to dispute against the "angel

of the schools." I merely say--Happy must he be who always resides in

one of these three paradises!

Some curious critics have thought the paradise of the Hesperides,

guarded by a dragon, was an imitation of the garden of Eden, kept by a

winged ox or a cherub. Others, more rash, have ventured to assert that

the ox was a bad copy of the dragon, and that the Jews were always gross

plagiarists; but this will be admitted to be blasphemy, and that idea is

insupportable.

Why has the name of paradise been applied to the square courts in the

front of a church? Why has the third row of boxes at the theatre or

opera house been called paradise? Is it because, as these places are

less dear than others, it was thought they were intended for the poor,

and because it is pretended that in the other paradise there are far

more poor persons than rich? Is it because these boxes are so high that

they have obtained a name which also signifies heaven? There is,

however, some difference between ascending to heaven, and ascending to

the third row of boxes. What would a stranger think on his arrival at

Paris, when asked: "Are you inclined to go to paradise to see

Pourceaugnac?"

What incongruities and equivoques are to be found in all languages! How

strongly is human weakness manifested in every object that is presented

around us! See the article "Paradise" in the great Encyclopædia. It is

certainly better than this. We conclude with the Abbé de St. Pierre's

favorite sentiment--"Paradise to the beneficent."

PASSIONS.

_Their Influence Upon The Body, And That Of The Body Upon Them._

Pray inform me, doctor--I do not mean a doctor of medicine, who really

possesses some degree of knowledge, who has long examined the

sinuosities of the brain, who has investigated whether there is a

circulating fluid in the nerves, who has repeatedly and assiduously

dissected the human matrix in vain, to discover something of the

formation of thinking beings, and who, in short, knows all of our

machine that can be known; alas! I mean a very different person, a

doctor of theology--I adjure you, by that reason at the very name of

which you shudder, tell me why it is, that in consequence of your young

and handsome housekeeper saying a few loving words, and giving herself a

few coquettish airs, your blood becomes instantly agitated, and your

whole frame thrown into a tumult of desire, which speedily leads to

pleasures, of which neither herself nor you can explain the cause, but

which terminate with the introduction into the world of a thinking being

encrusted all over with original sin. Inform me, I entreat you, how the

action tends to or is connected with the result? You may read and

re-read Sanchez and Thomas Aquinas, and Scot and Bonaventure, but you

will never in consequence know an iota the more of that incomprehensible

mechanism by which the eternal architect directs your ideas and your

actions, and originates the little bastard of a priest predestined to

damnation from all eternity.

On the following morning, when taking your chocolate, your memory

retraces the image of pleasure which you experienced the evening before,

and the scene and rapture are repeated. Have you any idea, my great

automaton friend, what this same memory, which you possess in common

with every species of animals, really is? Do you know what fibres recall

your ideas, and paint in your brain the joys of the evening by a

continuous sentiment, a consciousness, a personal identity which slept

with you, and awoke with you? The doctor replies, in the language of

Thomas Aquinas, that all this is the work of his vegetative soul, his

sensitive soul, and his intellectual soul, all three of which compose a

soul which, although without extension itself, evidently acts on a body

possessed of extension in course.

I perceived by his embarrassed manner, that he has been stammering out

words without a single idea; and I at length say to him: If you feel,

doctor, that, however reluctantly, you must in your own mind admit that

you do not know what a soul is, and that you have been talking all your

life without any distinct meaning, why not acknowledge it like an honest

man? Why do you not conclude the same as must be concluded from the

physical promotion of Doctor Bourssier, and from certain passages of

Malebranche, and, above all, from the acute and judicious Locke, so far

superior to Malebranche--why do you not, I say, conclude that your soul

is a faculty which God has bestowed on you without disclosing to you the

secret of His process, as He has bestowed on you various others? Be

assured, that many men of deep reflection maintain that, properly

speaking, the unknown power of the Divine Artificer, and His unknown

laws, alone perform everything in us: and that, to speak more correctly

still, we shall never know in fact anything at all about the matter.

The doctor at this becomes agitated and irritated; the blood rushes into

his face; if he had been stronger than myself, and had not been

restrained by a sense of decency, he would certainly have struck me. His

heart swells; the systole and diastole are interrupted in their regular

operation; his brain is compressed; and he falls down in a fit of

apoplexy. What connection could there be between this blood, and heart,

and brain, and an old opinion of the doctor contrary to my own? Does a

pure intellectual spirit fall into syncope when another is of a

different opinion? I have uttered certain sounds; he has uttered certain

sounds; and behold! he falls down in apoplexy--he drops dead!

I am sitting at table, "_prima mensis,_" in the first of the month,

myself and my soul, at the Sorbonne, with five or six doctors, "_socii

Sorbonnici,_" fellows of the institution. We are served with bad and

adulterated wine; at first our souls are elevated and maddened; half an

hour afterwards our souls are stupefied, and as it were annihilated; and

on the ensuing morning these same worthy doctors issue a grand decree,

deciding that the soul, although occupying no place, let it be

remembered, and absolutely immaterial--is lodged in the "_corpus

callosum_" of the brain, in order to pay their court to surgeon La

Peyronie.

A guest is sitting at table full of conversation and gayety. A letter is

brought him that overwhelms him with astonishment, grief, and

apprehension. Instantly the muscles of his abdomen contract and relax

with extraordinary violence, the peristaltic motion of the intestines is

augmented, the sphincter of the rectum is opened by the convulsions

which agitate his frame, and the unfortunate gentleman, instead of

finishing his dinner in comfort, produces a copious evacuation. Tell me,

then, what secret connection nature has established between an idea and

a water-closet.

Of all those persons who have undergone the operation of trepanning, a

great proportion always remain imbecile. Of course, therefore, the

thinking fibres of their brain have been injured; but where are these

thinking fibres? Oh, Sanchez! Oh, Masters de Grillandis, Tamponet,

Riballier! Oh, Cogé-Pecus, second regent and rector of the university,

do give me a clear, decisive, and satisfactory explanation of all this,

if you possibly can!

While I was writing this article at Mount Krapak for my own private

improvement, a book was brought to me called "The Medicine of the Mind,"

by Doctor Camus, professor of medicine in the University of Paris. I was

in hopes of finding in this book a solution of all my difficulties. But

what was it that I found in fact? Just nothing at all. Ah, Master Camus!

you have not displayed much mind in preparing your "Medicine of the

Mind." This person strongly recommends the blood of an ass, drawn from

behind the ear, as a specific against madness. "The virtue of the blood

of an ass," he says, "re-establishes the soul in its functions." He

maintains, also, that madmen are cured by giving them the itch. He

asserts, likewise, that in order to gain or strengthen a memory, the

meat of capons, leverets, and larks, is of eminent service, and that

onions and butter ought to be avoided above all things. This was printed

in 1769 with the king's approbation and privilege; and there really were

people who consigned their health to the keeping of Master Camus,

professor of medicine! Why was he not made first physician to the king?

Poor puppets of the Eternal Artificer, who know neither why nor how an

invisible hand moves all the springs of our machine, and at length packs

us away in our wooden box! We constantly see more and more reason for

repeating, with Aristotle, All is occult, all is secret.

PAUL.

SECTION I.

_Questions Concerning Paul._

Was Paul a Roman citizen, as he boasted? If he was a native of Tarsus in

Cilicia, Tarsus was not a Roman colony until a hundred years after his

death; upon this point all antiquaries are agreed. If he belonged to the

little town or village of Gescala, as St. Jerome believed, this town was

in Galilee, and certainly the Galileans were not Roman citizens.

Is it true, that St. Paul entered into the rising society of Christians,

who at that time were demi-Jews, only because Gamaliel, whose disciple

he was, refused him his daughter in marriage? It appears that this

accusation is to be found exclusively in the Acts of the Apostles, which

are received by the Ebionites, and refuted by the Bishop Epiphanius in

his thirtieth chapter.

Is it true, that St. Thecla sought St. Paul in the disguise of a man,

and are the acts of St. Thecla admissible? Tertullian, in the thirteenth

chapter of his book on "Baptism," maintains that this history was

composed by a priest attached to Paul. Jerome and Cyprian, in refuting

the story of the lion baptized by St. Thecla, affirm the genuineness of

these acts, in which we find that singular portrait of St. Paul, which

we have already recorded. "He was fat, short, and broad shouldered; his

dark eyebrows united across his aquiline nose; his legs were crooked,

his head bald, and he was full of the grace of the Lord." This is pretty

nearly his portrait in the "Philopatris" of Lucian, with the exception

of "the grace of God," with which Lucian unfortunately had no

acquaintance.

Is Paul to be reprehended for his reproof of the Judaizing of St. Peter,

who himself Judaized for eight days together in the temple of Jerusalem?

When Paul was traduced before the governor of Judæa for having

introduced strangers into the temple, was it proper for him to say to

the governor, that he was prosecuted on account of his teaching the

resurrection of the dead, whilst of the resurrection of the dead nothing

was said at all.

Did Paul do right in circumcising his disciple Timothy, after having

written to the Galatians, that if they were circumcised Jesus would not

profit them? Was it well to write to the Corinthians, chap. ix.: Have we

not power to eat and drink at your expense? "Have we not power to lead

about a sister, a wife?" etc. Was it proper to write in his Second

Epistle to the Corinthians, that he will pardon none of them, neither

those who have sinned nor others? What should we think at present of a

man who pretended to live at our expense, himself, and his wife; and to

judge and to punish us, confounding the innocent with the guilty? What

are we to understand by the ascension of Paul into the third

heaven?--what is the third heaven? Which is the most probable--humanly

speaking? Did St. Paul become a Christian in consequence of being thrown

from a horse by the appearance of a great light at noon day, from which

a celestial voice exclaimed: Saul, "Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" or

was it in consequence of being irritated against the Pharisees, either

by the refusal of Gamaliel to give him his daughter, or by some other

cause?

In all other history, the refusal of Gamaliel would appear more probable

than the celestial voice; especially if, moreover, we were not obliged

to believe in this miracle. I only ask these questions in order to be

instructed; and I request all those who are willing to instruct me to

speak reasonably.

SECTION II.

The Epistles of St. Paul are so sublime, it is often difficult to

understand them. Many young bachelors demand the precise signification

of the following words: "Every man praying or prophesying, having his

head covered, dishonoreth his head." What does he mean by the words: "I

have learned from the Lord, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which

He was betrayed, took bread?"

How could he learn anything from that Jesus Christ to Whom he had never

spoken, and to Whom he had been a most cruel enemy, without ever having

seen Him? Was it by inspiration, or by the recital of the apostles? or

did he learn it when the celestial light caused him to fall from his

horse? He does not inform us on this point.

The following again: "The woman shall be saved in child-bearing." This

is certainly to encourage population: it appears not that St. Paul

founded convents. He speaks of seducing spirits and doctrines of devils;

of those whose consciences are seared up with a red-hot iron, who forbid

to marry, and command to abstain from meats. This is very strong. It

appears that he abjured monks, nuns, and fast-days. Explain this

contradiction; deliver me from this cruel embarrassment.

What is to be said of the passage in which he recommends the bishops to

have one wife?--"_Unius uxoris virum._" This is positive. He permits the

bishops to have but one wife, whilst the Jewish pontiffs might have

several. He says unequivocally, that the last judgment will happen

during his own time, that Jesus will descend from on high, as described

by St. Luke, and that St. Paul and the righteous inhabitants of

Thessalonica will be caught up to Him in the air, etc.

Has this occurred? or is it an allegory, a figure? Did he actually

believe that he should make this journey, or that he had been caught up

into the third heaven? Which is the third heaven? How will he ascend

into the air? Has he been there? "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,

the Father of Glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom." Is this

acknowledging Jesus to be the same God as the Father? He has manifested

His power over Jesus "when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at

His own right hand." Does this constitute the divinity of Jesus?

"Thou madest him (Jesus) a little lower than angels; thou crownedst him

with glory." If He is inferior to angels--is He God?

"For if by one man's offence death reigneth, much more they who receive

of the abundance of grace, and of the gift of righteousness, shall reign

in life by one Jesus Christ." Almost man and never God, except in a

single passage contested by Erasmus, Grotius, Le Clerc, etc.

"Children of God, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ." Is not this

constantly regarding Jesus as one of us, although superior by the grace

of God? "To God, alone wise, honor and glory, through Jesus Christ." How

are we to understand these passages literally, without fearing to offend

Jesus Christ; or, in a more extended sense, without the risk of

offending God the Father?

There are many more passages of this kind, which exercise the sagacity

of the learned. The commentators differ, and we pretend not to possess

any light which can remove the obscurity. We submit with heart and mouth

to the decision of the Church. We have also taken some trouble to

penetrate into the meaning of the following passages:

"For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keepest the law; but if thou

be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision." "Now

we know, that whatever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the

law; that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become

guilty before God. Therefore, by the deeds of the law shall no flesh be

justified; for by the law is the knowledge of sin.... Seeing that it is

one God which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and

uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the law, through

faith? God forbid; yea, we establish the law." "For if Abraham was

justified by his works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God."

We fear that even the ingenuous and profound Dom Calmet himself gives us

not, upon these somewhat obscure passages, a light which dissipates all

our darkness. It is without doubt our own fault that we do not

understand the commentators, and are deprived of that complete

conception of the text, which is given only to privileged souls. As

soon, however, as an explanation shall come from the chair of truth, we

shall comprehend the whole perfectly.

SECTION III.

Let us add this little supplement to the article "Paul." It is better to

edify ourselves with the Epistles of this apostle, than to weaken our

piety by calumniating the times and persons for which they were written.

The learned search in vain for the year and the day in which St. Paul

assisted to stone St. Stephen, and to guard the mantles of his

executioners.

They dispute on the year in which he was thrown from his horse by a

miraculous light at noonday, and on the epoch of his being borne away

into the third heaven. They can agree neither upon the year in which he

was conducted to Rome, nor that in which he died. They are unacquainted

with the date of any of his letters. St. Jerome, in his commentary on

the "Epistle to Philemon" says that Paul might signify the _embouchure_

of a flute.

The letters of St. Paul to Seneca, and from Seneca to St. Paul, were

accounted as authentic in the primitive ages of the Church, as all the

rest of the Christian writings. St. Jerome asserts their authenticity,

and quotes passages from these letters in his catalogue. St. Augustine

doubts them not in his 153d letter to Macedonius. We have thirty letters

of these two great men, Paul and Seneca, who, it is pretended, were

linked together by a strict friendship in the court of Nero. The seventh

letter from Paul to Seneca is very curious. He tells him that the Jews

and the Christians were often burned as incendiaries at Rome:

"_Christiani et Judæi tanquam machinatores incendii supplicio affici

solent._" It is in fact probable, that the Jews and the Christians,

whose mutual enmity was extremely violent, reciprocally accused each

other of setting the city on fire; and that the scorn and horror felt

towards the Jews, with whom the Christians were usually confounded,

rendered them equally the objects of public suspicion and vengeance.

We are obliged to acknowledge, that the epistolary correspondence of

Seneca and Paul is in a ridiculous and barbarous Latin; that the

subjects of these letters are as inconsistent as the style; and that at

present they are regarded as forgeries. But, then, may we venture to

contradict the testimony of St. Jerome and St. Augustine? If writings,

attested by them, are nothing but vile impostures, how shall we be

certain of the authenticity of others more respectable? Such is the

important objection of many learned persons. If we are unworthily

deceived, say they, in relation to the letters of Paul and Seneca on the

Apostolical Institutes, and the Acts of St. Peter, why may we not be

equally imposed upon by the Acts of the Apostles? The decision of the

Church and faith are unequivocal answers to all these researches of

science and suggestions of the understanding.

It is not known upon what foundation Abdias, first bishop of Babylon,

says, in his "History of the Apostles," that St. Paul caused St. James

the Less to be stoned by the people. Before he was converted, however,

he might as readily persecute St. James as St. Stephen. He was certainly

very violent, because it is said in the Acts of the Apostles, that he

"breathed threatenings and slaughter". Abdias has also taken care to

observe, that the mover of the sedition in which St. James was so

cruelly treated, was the same Paul whom God had since called to the

apostleship.

This book, attributed to Abdias, is not admitted into the canon; but

Julius Africanus, who has translated it into Latin, believes it to be

authentic. Since, however, the church has not admitted it, _we_ must not

admit it. Let us content ourselves with adoring Providence, and wishing

that all persecutors were transformed into charitable and compassionate

apostles.

PERSECUTION.

I will not call Diocletian a persecutor, for he protected the Christians

for eighteen years; and if, during his latter days, he did not save them

from the resentment of Galerius, he only furnished the example of a

prince seduced, like many others, by intrigue and cabal, into a conduct

unworthy of his character. I will still less give the name of persecutor

to Trajan or Antonius. I should regard myself as uttering blasphemy.

What is a persecutor? He whose wounded pride and fanaticism irritate

princes and magistrates into fury against innocent men, whose only crime

is that of being of a different opinion. Impudent man! you have

worshipped God; you have preached and practised virtue; you have served

and assisted man; you have protected the orphan, have succored the poor;

you have changed deserts, in which slaves dragged on a miserable

existence, into fertile districts peopled with happy families; but I

have discovered that you despise me, and have never read my

controversial work. I will, therefore, seek the confessor of the prime

minister, or the magistrate; I will show them, with outstretched neck

and twisted mouth, that you hold an erroneous opinion in relation to the

cells in which the Septuagint was studied; that you have even spoken

disrespectfully for these ten years past of Tobit's dog, which you

assert to have been a spaniel, whilst I maintain that it was a

greyhound. I will denounce you as the enemy of God and man! Such is the

language of the persecutor; and if these words do not precisely issue

from his lips, they are engraven on his heart with the graver of

fanaticism steeped in the gall of envy.

It was thus that the Jesuit Letellier dared to persecute Cardinal de

Noailles, and that Jurieu persecuted Bayle. When the persecution of the

Protestants commenced in France, it was not Francis I., nor Henry II.,

nor Francis II., who sought out these unfortunate people, who hardened

themselves against them with reflective bitterness, and who delivered

them to the flames in the spirit of vengeance. Francis I. was too much

engaged with the Duchess d'Étampes; Henry II., with his ancient Diana,

and Francis II. was too much a child. Who, then, commenced these

persecutions? Jealous priests, who enlisted in their service the

prejudices of magistrates and the policy of ministers.

If these monarchs had not been deceived, if they had foreseen that these

persecutions would produce half a century of civil war, and that the two

parts of the nation would mutually exterminate each other, they would

have extinguished with their tears the first piles which they allowed to

be lighted. Oh, God of mercy! if any man can resemble that malignant

being who is described as actually employed in the destruction of Your

works, is it not the persecutor?

PETER (SAINT).

Why have the successors of St. Peter possessed so much power in the West

and none in the East? This is just the same as to ask why the bishops of

Würzburg and Salzburg obtained for themselves regal prerogatives in a

period of anarchy, while the Greek bishops always remained subjects.

Time, opportunity, the ambition of some, and the weakness of others,

have done and will do everything in the world. We always except what

relates to religion. To this anarchy, must be added opinion; and opinion

is the queen of mankind. Not that, in fact, they have any very clear and

definite opinion of their own, but words answer the same end with them.

"I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." The zealous

partisans of the bishop of Rome contended, about the eleventh century,

that whoever gives the greater gives the less; that heaven surrounded

the earth; and that, as Peter had the keys of the container, he had also

the keys of what was contained. If by heaven we understand all the stars

and planets, it is evident, according to Tomasius, that the keys given

to Simon Barjonas, surnamed Peter, were a universal passport. If we

understand by heaven the clouds, the atmosphere, the ether, and the

space in which the planets revolve, no smith in the world, as Meursius

observes, could ever make a key for such gates as these. Railleries,

however, are not reasons.

Keys in Palestine were wooden latches with strings to them. Jesus says

to Barjonas, "Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in

heaven." The pope's clergy concluded from these words, that the popes

had received authority to bind and unbind the people's oath of fidelity

to their kings, and to dispose of kingdoms at their pleasure. This

certainly was concluding magnificently. The Commons in the

states-general of France, in 1302, say, in their memorial to the king,

that "Boniface VIII. was a b---- for believing that God bound and

imprisoned in heaven what Boniface bound on earth." A famous German

Lutheran--the great Melancthon--could not endure the idea of Jesus

having said to Simon Barjonas, Cepha or Cephas, "Thou art Peter, and

upon this rock will I build my assembly, my church." He could not

conceive that God would use such a play of words, and that the power of

the pope could have been established on a pun. Such a doubt, however,

can be indulged only by a Protestant.

Peter has been considered as having been bishop of Rome; but it is well

known that, in the apostolic age, and long after, there was no

particular and appropriate bishopric. The society of Christians did not

assume a regular form until about the middle of the second century. It

may be true that Peter went to Rome, and even that he was crucified with

his head downwards, although that was not the usual mode of crucifixion;

but we have no proof whatever of all this. We have a letter under his

name, in which he says that he is at Babylon: acute and shrewd canonists

have contended that, by Babylon, we ought to understand Rome; and on the

same principle, if he had dated at Rome, we might have concluded that

the letter had been written at Babylon. Men have long been in the habit

of drawing such reasonable and judicious inferences as these; and it is

in this manner that the world has been governed.

There was once a clergyman who, after having been made to pay

extortionately for a benefice at Rome--an offence known by the name of

simony--happened to be asked, some time afterwards, whether he thought

Simon Peter had ever been in that city? He replied, "I do not think that

Peter was ever there, but I am sure Simon was."

With respect to the personal character and behavior of St. Peter, it

must be acknowledged that Paul is not the only one who was scandalized

at his conduct. He was often "withstood to the face," as well as his

successors. St. Paul vehemently reproached him with eating forbidden

meats: that is, pork, blood-pudding, hare, eels, the ixion, and the

griffin; Peter vindicated himself by saying that he had seen heaven

opened about the sixth hour, and as it were a great sheet descending

from the four corners of it, which was filled with creeping things,

quadrupeds, and birds, while the voice of an angel called out to him,

saying, "Kill and eat." This, says Woolston, seems to have been the same

voice which has called out to so many pontiffs since, "Kill everything;

eat up the substance of the people." But this reproach is much too

strong.

Casaubon cannot by any means bring himself to approve the manner in

which St. Peter treated Ananias and Sapphira, his wife. "By what right,"

says Casaubon, "did a Jew slave of the Romans order or permit that all

those who believed in Jesus should sell their inheritance, and lay down

the price paid for it at his feet?" If an Anabaptist at London was to

order all the money belonging to his brethren to be brought and laid at

his feet, would he not be apprehended as a seditious seducer, as a thief

who would certainly be hanged at Tyburn? Was it not abominable to kill

Ananias, because, after having sold his property and delivered over the

bulk of the produce to Peter, he had retained for himself and his wife a

few crowns for any case of necessity, without mentioning it? Scarcely,

moreover, has Ananias expired, before his wife arrives. Peter, instead

of warning her charitably that he had just destroyed her husband by

apoplexy for having kept back a few oboli, and cautioning her therefore

to look well to herself, leads her as it were intentionally into the

snare. He asks her if her husband has given all his money to the saints;

the poor woman replies in the affirmative, and dies instantly. This is

certainly rather severe.

Corringius asks, why Peter, who thus killed the persons that had given

him alms and showed him kindness, did not rather go and destroy all the

learned doctors who had brought Jesus Christ to the cross, and who more

than once brought a scourging on himself. "Oh, Peter!" says Corringius,

"you put to death two Christians who bestowed alms on you, and at the

same time suffer those to live who crucified your God!"

In the reigns of Henry IV., and Louis XIII., we had an advocate-general

of the parliament of Provence, a man of quality, called d'Oraison de

Torame, who, in a book respecting the church militant, dedicated to

Henry IV., has appropriated a whole chapter to the sentences pronounced

by St. Peter in criminal causes. He says, that the sentence pronounced

by Peter on Ananias and Sapphira was executed by God Himself, "in the

very terms and forms of spiritual jurisdiction." His whole book is in

the same strain; but Corringius, as we perceive, is of a different

opinion from that of our sagacious and liberal provincial advocate. It

is pretty evident that Corringius was not in the country of the

Inquisition when he published his bold remarks.

Erasmus, in relation to St. Peter, remarked a somewhat curious

circumstance, which is, that the chief of the Christian religion began

his apostleship with denying Jesus Christ, and that the first pontiff of

the Jews commenced his ministry by making a golden calf and worshipping

it.

However that may be, Peter is described as a poor man instructing the

poor. He resembles those founders of orders who lived in indigence, and

whose successors have become great lords and even princes.

The pope, the successor of Peter, has sometimes gained and sometimes

lost; but there are still about fifty millions of persons in the world

submitting in many points to his laws, besides his own immediate

subjects.

To obtain a master three or four hundred leagues from home; to suspend

your own opinion and wait for what he puts forth as his; not to dare to

give a final decision on a cause relating to certain of our

fellow-citizens, but through commissioners appointed by this stranger;

not to dare to take possession of certain fields and vineyards granted

by our own sovereign, without paying a considerable sum to this foreign

master; to violate the laws of our country, which prohibit a man's

marriage with his niece, and marry her legitimately by giving this

foreign master a sum still more considerable than the former one; not to

dare to cultivate one's field on the day this stranger is inclined to

celebrate the memory of some unknown person whom he has chosen to

introduce into heaven by his own sole authority; such are a part only of

the conveniences and comforts of admitting the jurisdiction of a pope;

such, if we may believe Marsais, are the liberties of the Gallican

Church.

There are some other nations that carry their submission further. We

have, in our own time, actually known a sovereign request permission of

the pope to try in his own courts certain monks accused of parricide,

and able neither to obtain this permission nor to venture on such trial

without it!

It is well known that, formerly, the power of the popes extended

further. They were far above the gods of antiquity; for the latter were

merely supposed to dispose of empires, but the popes disposed of them in

fact. Sturbinus says, that we may pardon those who entertain doubts of

the divinity and infallibility of the pope, when we reflect: that forty

schisms have profaned the chair of St. Peter, twenty-seven of which have

been marked by blood; that Stephen VII., the son of a priest,

disinterred the corpse of Formosus, his predecessor, and had the head of

it cut off; that Sergius III., convicted of assassinations, had a son by

Marozia, who inherited the popedom; that John X., the paramour of

Theodora, was strangled in her bed; that John XI., son of Sergius III.,

was known only by his gross intemperance; that John XII. was

assassinated in the apartments of his mistress; that Benedict IX. both

bought and sold the pontificate; that Gregory VII. was the author of

five hundred years of civil war, carried on by his successors; that,

finally, among so many ambitious, sanguinary, and debauched popes, there

was an Alexander VI., whose name is pronounced with the same horror as

those of Nero and Caligula.

It is, we are told, a proof of the divinity of their character, that it

has subsisted in connection with so many crimes; but according to this,

if the caliphs had displayed still more atrocious and abominable

conduct, they would have been still more divine. This argument,

inferring their divinity from their wickedness, is urged by Dermius. He

has been properly answered; but the best reply is to be found in the

mitigated authority which the bishops of Rome at present exercise with

discretion; in the long possession which the emperors permit them to

enjoy, because in fact they are unable to deprive them of it; and in the

system of the balance of power, which is watched with jealousy by every

court in Europe.

It has been contended, and very lately, that there are only two nations

which could invade Italy and crush Rome. These are the Turks and

Russians; but they are necessarily enemies; and, besides, I cannot

distinctly anticipate misfortunes so distant.

_Je ne sais point prévoir les malheurs de si loin._

--RACINE, _Andromache,_ act. i, scene 2.

PETER THE GREAT AND J.J. ROUSSEAU.

"The Czar Peter ... had not true genius--that which creates and makes

all of nothing. Some things which he did were good; the greater part

were misplaced. He saw that his people were barbarous; he has not seen

that they were not prepared for polishing; he would civilize them when

they only wanted training. He wished at once to make Germans and English

when he should have commenced by making Russians. He prevented his

subjects from becoming what they might be, by persuading them that they

were what they are not. It is thus that a French preceptor forms his

pupil to shine for a moment in his childhood, and never afterwards to be

anything. The empire of Russia would subjugate Europe, and will be

subjugated itself. The Tartars, its subjects or neighbors, will become

its masters and ours. This revolution appears to me unavoidable: all the

kings of Europe labor together to accelerate it." (_Contrat Social,_

livre ii. chap. viii.) These words are extracted from a pamphlet

entitled the "_Contrat Social,_" or "unsocial," of the very unsociable

Jean Jacques Rousseau. It is not astonishing, that having performed

miracles at Venice he should prophesy on Moscow; but as he well knows

that the good time of miracles and prophecies has passed away, he ought

to believe, that his prediction against Russia is not so infallible as

it appeared to him in his first fit of divination. It is pleasant to

announce the fall of great empires; it consoles us for our littleness.

It will be a fine gain for philosophy, when we shall constantly behold

the Nogais Tartars--who can, I believe, bring twelve thousand men into

the field--coming to subjugate Russia, Germany, Italy, and France. But I

flatter myself, that the Emperor of China will not suffer it; he has

already acceded to perpetual peace, and as he has no more Jesuits about

him, he will not trouble Europe. Jean Jacques, who possesses, as he

himself believes, true genius, finds that Peter the Great had it not.

[Illustration: JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU]

A Russian lord, a man of much wit, who sometimes amuses himself with

reading pamphlets, while reading this, remembered some lines of Molière,

implying, that three miserable authors took it into their heads, that it

was only necessary to be printed and bound in calf, to become important

personages and dispose of empires:

_Il semble à trois gredins, dans leur petit cerveau,_

_Que pour être imprimés et reliés en veau,_

_Les voilà dans l'état d'importantes personnes,_

_Qu'avec leur plume ils font le destin des couronnes._

The Russians, says Jean Jacques, were never polished. I have seen some

at least very polite, and who had just, delicate, agreeable, cultivated,

and even logical minds, which Jean Jacques will find very extraordinary.

As he is very gallant, he will not fail to say, that they are formed at

the court of the empress of Russia, that her example has influenced

them: but that prevents not the correctness of his prophecy--that this

empire will soon be destroyed.

This good little man assures us, in one of his modest works, that a

statue should be erected to him. It will not probably be either at

Moscow or St. Petersburg, that anyone will trouble himself to sculpture

Jean Jacques.

I wish, in general, that when people judge of nations from their

garrets, they would be more honest and circumspect. Every poor devil can

say what he pleases of the Romans, Athenians, and ancient Persians. He

can deceive himself with impunity on the tribunes, comitia, and

dictatorships. He can govern in idea two or three thousand leagues of

country, whilst he is incapable of governing his servant girl. In a

romance, he can receive "an acrid kiss" from his Julia, and advise a

prince to espouse the daughter of a hangman. These are follies without

consequence--there are others which may have disastrous effects.

Court fools were very discreet; they insulted the weak alone by their

buffooneries, and respected the powerful: country fools are at present

more bold. It will be answered, that Diogenes and Aretin were tolerated.

Granted; but a fly one day seeing a swallow wing away with a spider's

web, would do the same thing, and was taken.

SECTION II.

May we not say of these legislators who govern the universe at two sous

the sheet, and who from their garrets give orders to all kings, what

Homer said to Calchas?:

_Os ede ta conta, taere essomena, pro theonta._

He knew the past, present, and future.

It is a pity that the author of the little paragraph which we are going

to quote, knew nothing of the three times of which Homer speaks. "Peter

the Great," says he, "had not the genius which makes all of nothing."

Truly, Jean Jacques, I can easily believe it; for it is said that God

alone has this prerogative. "He has not seen that his people were not

prepared for polishing."

In this case, it was admirable of the czar to prepare them. It appears

to me, that it is Jean Jacques who had not seen that he must make use of

the Germans and English to form Russians.

"He has prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might be,"

etc. Yet these same Russians have become the conquerors of the Turks and

Tartars, the conquerors and legislators of the Crimea, and twenty

different nations. Their sovereign has given laws to nations of which

even the names were unknown in Europe.

As to the prophecy of Jean Jacques, he may have exalted his soul

sufficiently to read the future. He has all the requisites of a prophet;

but as to the past and the present, it must be confessed that he knows

nothing about them. I doubt whether antiquity has anything comparable to

the boldness of sending four squadrons from the extremity of the Baltic

into the seas of Greece--of reigning at once over the Ægean and the

Euxine Seas--of carrying terror into Colchis, and to the Dardanelles--of

subjugating Taurida, and forcing the vizier Azem to fly from the shores

of the Danube to the gates of Adrianople.

If Jean Jacques considers so many great actions which astonished the

attentive world as nothing, he must at least confess, that there was

some generosity in one Count Orloff, who having taken a vessel which

contained all the family and treasures of a pasha, sent him back both

his family and treasures. If the Russians were not prepared for

polishing in the time of Peter the Great, let us agree that they are now

prepared for greatness of soul; and that Jean Jacques is not quite

prepared for truth and reasoning. With regard to the future, we shall

know it when we have Ezekiels, Isaiahs, Habakkuks, and Micahs; but their

time has passed away; and if we dare say so much, it is to be feared

that it will never return.

I confess that these lies, printed in relation to present times, always

astonish me. If these liberties are allowed in an age in which a

thousand volumes, a thousand newspapers and journals, are constantly

correcting each other, what faith can we have in those histories of

ancient times, which collected all vague rumors without consulting any

archives, which put into writing all that they had heard told by their

grandmothers in their childhood, very sure that no critic would discover

their errors?

We had for a long time nine muses: wholesome criticism is the tenth,

which has appeared very lately. She existed not in the time of Cecrops,

of the first Bacchus, or of Sanchoniathon, Thaut, Bramah, etc. People

then wrote all they liked with impunity. At present we must be a little

more careful.

PHILOSOPHER.

SECTION I.

Philosopher, "lover of wisdom," that is, "of truth." All philosophers

have possessed this two-fold character; there is not one among those of

antiquity who did not give examples of virtue to mankind, and lessons of

moral truth. They might be mistaken, and undoubtedly were so, on

subjects of natural philosophy; but that is of comparatively so little

importance to the conduct of life, that philosophers had then no need of

it. Ages were required to discover a part of the laws of nature. A

single day is sufficient to enable a sage to become acquainted with the

duties of man.

The philosopher is no enthusiast; he does not set himself up for a

prophet; he does not represent himself as inspired by the gods. I shall

not therefore place in the rank of philosophers the ancient Zoroaster,

or Hermes, or Orpheus, or any of those legislators in whom the countries

of Chaldæa, Persia, Syria, Egypt, and Greece made their boast. Those who

called themselves the sons of gods were the fathers of imposture; and if

they employed falsehood to inculcate truths, they were unworthy of

inculcating them; they were not philosophers; they were at best only

prudent liars.

By what fatality, disgraceful perhaps to the nations of the West, has it

happened that we are obliged to travel to the extremity of the East, in

order to find a sage of simple manners and character, without arrogance

and without imposture, who taught men how to live happy six hundred

years before our era, at a period when the whole of the North was

ignorant of the use of letters, and when the Greeks had scarcely begun

to distinguish themselves by wisdom? That sage is Confucius, who deemed

too highly of his character as a legislator for mankind, to stoop to

deceive them. What finer rule of conduct has ever been given since his

time, throughout the earth?

"Rule a state as you rule a family; a man cannot govern his family well

without giving a good example; virtue should be common to the laborer

and the monarch; be active in preventing crimes, that you may lessen the

trouble of punishing them.

"Under the good kings Yao and Xu, the Chinese were good; under the bad

kings Kie and Chu, they were wicked.

"Do to another as to thyself; love mankind in general, but cherish those

who are good; forget injuries, but never benefits."

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of

virtue. Let us acknowledge that no legislator ever announced to the

world more useful truths.

A multitude of Greek philosophers taught afterwards a morality equally

pure. Had they distinguished themselves only by their vain systems of

natural philosophy, their names would be mentioned at the present day

only in derision. If they are still respected, it is because they were

just, and because they taught mankind to be so.

It is impossible to read certain passages of Plato, and particularly the

admirable exordium of the laws of Zaleucus, without experiencing an

ardent love of honorable and generous actions. The Romans have their

Cicero who alone is perhaps more valuable than all the philosophers of

Greece. After him come men more respectable still, but whom we may

almost despair of imitating; these are Epictetus in slavery, and the

Antonines and Julian upon a throne.

Where is the citizen to be found among us who would deprive himself,

like Julian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius, of all the refined

accommodations of our delicate and luxurious modes of living? Who would,

like them, sleep on the bare ground? Who would restrict himself to their

frugal habits? Who would, like them, march bareheaded and barefooted at

the head of the armies, exposed sometimes to the burning sun, and at

other times to the freezing blast? Who would, like them, keep perfect

mastery of all his passions? We have among us devotees, but where are

the sages? where are the souls just and tolerant, serene and undaunted?

There have been some philosophers of the closet in France; and all of

them, with the exception of Montaigne, have been persecuted. It seems to

me the last degree of malignity that our nature can exhibit, to attempt

to oppress those who devote their best endeavors to correct and improve

it.

I can easily conceive of the fanatics of one sect slaughtering those of

another sect; that the Franciscans should hate the Dominicans, and that

a bad artist should cabal and intrigue for the destruction of an artist

that surpasses him; but that the sage Charron should have been menaced

with the loss of life; that the learned and noble-minded Ramus should

have been actually assassinated; that Descartes should have been obliged

to withdraw to Holland in order to escape the rage of ignorance; that

Gassendi should have been often compelled to retire to Digne, far

distant from the calumnies of Paris, are events that load a nation with

eternal opprobrium.

One of the philosophers who were most persecuted, was the immortal

Bayle, the honor of human nature. I shall be told that the name of

Jurieu, his slanderer and persecutor, is become execrable; I acknowledge

that it is so; that of the Jesuit Letellier is become so likewise; but

is it the less true that the great men whom he oppressed ended their

days in exile and penury?

One of the pretexts made use of for reducing Bayle to poverty, was his

article on David, in his valuable dictionary. He was reproached with not

praising actions which were in themselves unjust, sanguinary, atrocious,

contrary to good faith, or grossly offensive to decency.

Bayle certainly has not praised David for having, according to the

Hebrew historian, collected six hundred vagabonds overwhelmed with debts

and crimes; for having pillaged his countrymen at the head of these

banditti; for having resolved to destroy Nabal and his whole family,

because he refused paying contributions to him; for having hired out his

services to King Achish, the enemy of his country; for having afterwards

betrayed Achish, notwithstanding his kindness to him; for having sacked

the villages in alliance with that king; for having massacred in these

villages every human being, including even infants at the breast, that

no one might be found on a future day to give testimony of his

depredations, as if an infant could have possibly disclosed his

villainy; for having destroyed all the inhabitants of some other

villages under saws, and harrows, and axes, and in brick-kilns; for

having wrested the throne from Ishbosheth, the son of Saul, by an act of

perfidy; for having despoiled of his property and afterwards put to

death Mephibosheth, the grandson of Saul, and son of his own peculiar

friend and generous protector, Jonathan; or for having delivered up to

the Gibeonites two other sons of Saul, and five of his grandsons who

perished by the gallows.

I do not notice the extreme incontinence of David, his numerous

concubines, his adultery with Bathsheba, or his murder of Uriah.

What then! is it possible that the enemies of Bayle should have expected

or wished him to eulogize all these cruelties and crimes? Ought he to

have said: Go, ye princes of the earth, and imitate the man after God's

own heart; massacre without pity the allies of your benefactor; destroy

or deliver over to destruction the whole family of your king;

appropriate to your own pleasures all the women, while you are pouring

out the blood of the men; and you will thus exhibit models of human

virtue, especially if, in addition to all the rest, you do but compose a

book of psalms?

Was not Bayle perfectly correct in his observation, that if David was

the man after God's own heart, it must have been by his penitence, and

not by his crimes? Did not Bayle perform a service to the human race

when he said, that God, who undoubtedly dictated the Jewish history, has

not consecrated all the crimes recorded in that history?

However, Bayle was in fact persecuted, and by whom? By the very men who

had been elsewhere persecuted themselves; by refugees who in their own

country would have been delivered over to the flames; and these refugees

were opposed by other refugees called Jansenists, who had been driven

from their own country by the Jesuits; who have at length been

themselves driven from it in their turn.

Thus all the persecutors declare against each other mortal war, while

the philosopher, oppressed by them all, contents himself with pitying

them.

It is not generally known, that Fontenelle, in 1718, was on the point of

losing his pensions, place, and liberty, for having published in France,

twenty years before, what may be called an abridgement of the learned

Van Dale's "Treatise on Oracles", in which he had taken particular care

to retrench and modify the original work, so as to give no unnecessary

offence to fanaticism. A Jesuit had written against Fontenelle, and he

had not deigned to make him any reply; and that was enough to induce the

Jesuit Letellier, confessor to Louis XIV., to accuse Fontenelle to the

king of atheism.

But for the fortunate mediation of M. d'Argenson, the son of a forging

solicitor of Vire--a son worthy of such a father, as he was detected in

forgery himself--would have proscribed, in his old age, the nephew of

the great Corneille.

It is so easy for a confessor to seduce his penitent, that we ought to

bless God that Letellier did no more harm than is justly imputed to him.

There are two situations in which seduction and calumny cannot easily be

resisted--the bed and the confessional.

We have always seen philosophers persecuted by fanatics. But can it be

really possible, that men of letters should be seen mixed up in a

business so odious; and that they should often be observed sharpening

the weapons against their brethren, by which they are themselves almost

universally destroyed or wounded in their turn. Unhappy men of letters,

does it become you to turn informers? Did the Romans ever find a

Garasse, a Chaumeix, or a Hayet, to accuse a Lucretius, a Posidonius, a

Varro, or a Pliny?

How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is

it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite! There were no hypocrites

in ancient Rome, which reckoned us a small portion of its innumerable

subjects. There were impostors, I admit, but not religious hypocrites,

which are the most profligate and cruel species of all. Why is it that

we see none such in England, and whence does it arise that there still

are such in France? Philosophers, you will solve this problem with ease.