time, the idea that though to have no religion is very bad, yet to have a cruel and immoral religion is worse:—
"There have been many atheists among Christians; their number is now much diminished. What looks like a paradox, but which on examination will prove to be a truth, is that theology has often precipitated minds into atheism, while philosophy has rescued them from it. It was in fact pardonable in men to doubt of a Divinity, when the only persons who asserted it disputed as to its nature. The first Fathers of the Church nearly all represented the Supreme Power as corporeal; others followed who, giving it no more extent, lodged it in a certain part of the sky: according to some the Deity had created the world in time; according to others He had created time."
After enumerating some hotly-disputed points of theology, such as even now agitate the Catholic world, he goes on:—
"When the confidants of the Divinity were seen to agree so little among themselves, and to pronounce curses against each other from age to age, while all agreed in their uncontrolled thirst for riches and grandeur; when, in another direction, the view rests on the prodigious number of crimes and misfortunes with which the earth was beset, and of which so many were caused by the disputes of these very masters of souls,—it must be confessed that it seemed permissible to a reasonable man to doubt the reality of a being so strangely announced, and to a sympathetic man to imagine that a God who had voluntarily created so many unfortunates could have no existence.
"A philosopher has been given to the world, who has discovered by what simple and sublime laws all the celestial bodies move in the abyss of space. Thus the work of the universe, better known, shows a workman; and so many laws, always constant, prove a legislator. Sound philosophy has thus destroyed that atheism to which an obscure theology lent weapons."
