According to the principles of Christianity, poverty itself is a virtue, and it is this virtue which the sovereigns and the priests make their slaves observe the most.  According to these ideas, a great number of pious Christians have renounced with good-will the perishable riches of the earth; have distributed their patrimony to the poor, and have retired into a desert to live a life of voluntary indigence.  But very soon this enthusiasm, this supernatural taste for misery, must surrender to nature.  The successors to these voluntary poor, sold to the religious people their prayers and their powerful intercession with the Deity; they became rich and powerful; thus, monks and hermits lived in idleness, and, under the pretext of charity, devoured insultingly the substance of the poor.  Poverty of spirit was that of which religion made always the greatest use.  The fundamental virtue of all religion, that is to say, the most useful one to its ministers, is faith.  It consists in an unlimited credulity, which causes men to believe, without examination, all that which the interpreters of the Deity wish them to believe.  With the aid of this wonderful virtue, the priests became the arbiters of justice and of injustice; of good and of evil; they found it easy to commit crimes when crimes became necessary to their interests.  Implicit faith has been the source of the greatest outrages which have been committed upon the earth.

CLXX.—­CONFESSION, THAT GOLDEN MINE FOR THE PRIESTS, HAS DESTROYED THE TRUE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY.

He who first proclaimed to the nations that, when man had wronged man, he must ask God’s pardon, appease His wrath by presents, and offer Him sacrifices, obviously subverted the true principles of morality.  According to these ideas, men imagine that they can obtain from the King of Heaven, as well as from the kings of the earth, permission to be unjust and wicked, or at least pardon for the evil which they might commit.

Morality is founded upon the relations, the needs, and the constant interests of the inhabitants of the earth; the relations which subsist between men and God are either entirely unknown or imaginary.  The religion associating God with men has visibly weakened or destroyed the ties which unite men.

Mortals imagine that they can, with impunity, injure each other by making a suitable reparation to the Almighty Being, who is supposed to have the right to remit all the injuries done to His creatures.  Is there anything more liable to encourage wickedness and to embolden to crime, than to persuade men that there exists an invisible being who has the right to pardon injustice, rapine, perfidy, and all the outrages they can inflict upon society?  Encouraged by these fatal ideas, we see the most perverse men abandon themselves to the greatest crimes, and expect to repair them by imploring Divine mercy; their conscience rests in peace when a priest assures them that Heaven is