morals can have very legitimate motives for examining his religion, and for banishing it from his mind.  Too weak to intimidate the wicked, in whom vice has become deeply rooted, religious terrors afflict, torment, and burden imaginative minds.  If souls have courage and elasticity, they shake off a yoke which they bear unwillingly.  If weak or timorous, they wear the yoke during their whole life, and they grow old, trembling, or at least they live under burdensome uncertainty.

The priests have made of God such a malicious, ferocious being, so ready to be vexed, that there are few men in the world who do not wish at the bottom of their hearts that this God did not exist.  We can not live happy if we are always in fear.  You worship a terrible God, O religious people!  Alas!  And yet you hate Him; you wish that He was not.  Can we avoid wishing the absence or the destruction of a master, the idea of whom can but torment the mind?  It is the dark colors in which the priests paint the Deity which revolt men, moving them to hate and reject Him.

CLXXXIII.—­FEAR ALONE CREATES THEISTS AND BIGOTS.

If fear has created the Gods, fear still holds their empire in the mind of mortals; they have been so early accustomed to tremble even at the name of the Deity, that it has become for them a specter, a goblin, a were-wolf which torments them, and whose idea deprives them even of the courage to attempt to reassure themselves.  They are afraid that this invisible specter will strike them if they cease to be afraid.  The religious people fear their God too much to love Him sincerely; they serve Him as slaves, who can not escape His power, and take the part of flattering their Master; and who, by continually lying, persuade themselves that they love Him.  They make a virtue of necessity.  The love of religious bigots for their God, and of slaves for their despots, is but a servile and simulated homage which they render by compulsion, in which the heart has no part.

CLXXXIV.—­CAN WE, OR SHOULD WE, LOVE OR NOT LOVE GOD?

The Christian Doctors have made their God so little worthy of love, that several among them have thought it their duty not to love Him; this is a blasphemy which makes less sincere doctors tremble.  Saint Thomas, having asserted that we are under obligation to love God as soon as we can use our reason, the Jesuit Sirmond replied to him that that was very soon; the Jesuit Vasquez claims that it is sufficient to love God in the hour of death; Hurtado says that we should love God at all times; Henriquez is content with loving Him every five years; Sotus, every Sunday.  “Upon what shall we rely?” asks Father Sirmond, who adds:  “that Suarez desires that we should love God sometimes.  But at what time?  He allows you to judge of it; he knows nothing about it himself; for he adds:  ’What a learned doctor does not know, who can know?’”