God, we are told, created men intelligent, but He did not create them omniscient:  that is to say, capable of knowing all things.  We conclude that He was not able to endow him with intelligence sufficient to understand the divine essence.  In this case it is demonstrated that God has neither the power nor the wish to be known by men.  By what right could this God become angry with beings whose own essence makes it impossible to have any idea of the divine essence?  God would evidently be the most unjust and the most unaccountable of tyrants if He should punish an atheist for not knowing that which his nature made it impossible for him to know.

XXX.—­IT IS NEITHER LESS NOR MORE CRIMINAL TO BELIEVE IN GOD THAN NOT TO BELIEVE IN HIM.

For the generality of men nothing renders an argument more convincing than fear.  In consequence of this fact, theologians tell us that the safest side must be taken; that nothing is more criminal than incredulity; that God will punish without mercy all those who have the temerity to doubt His existence; that His severity is just; since it is only madness or perversity which questions the existence of an angry monarch who revenges himself cruelly upon atheists.  If we examine these menaces calmly, we shall find that they assume always the thing in question.  They must commence by proving to our satisfaction the existence of a God, before telling us that it is safer to believe, and that it is horrible to doubt or to deny it.  Then they must prove that it is possible for a just God to punish men cruelly for having been in a state of madness, which prevented them from believing in the existence of a being whom their enlightened reason could not comprehend.  In a word, they must prove that a God that is said to be full of equity, could punish beyond measure the invincible and necessary ignorance of man, caused by his relation to the divine essence.  Is not the theologians’ manner of reasoning very singular?  They create phantoms, they fill them with contradictions, and finally assure us that the safest way is not to doubt the existence of those phantoms, which they have themselves invented.  By following out this method, there is no absurdity which it would not be safer to believe than not to believe.

All children are atheists—­they have no idea of God; are they, then, criminal on account of this ignorance?  At what age do they begin to be obliged to believe in God?  It is, you say, at the age of reason.  At what time does this age begin?  Besides, if the most profound theologians lose themselves in the divine essence, which they boast of not comprehending, what ideas can common people have?—­women, mechanics, and, in short, those who compose the mass of the human race?

XXXI.—­THE BELIEF IN GOD IS NOTHING BUT A MECHANICAL HABITUDE OF CHILDHOOD.

Men believe in God only upon the word of those who have no more idea of Him than they themselves.  Our nurses are our first theologians; they talk to children of God as they talk to them of were-wolfs; they teach them from the most tender age to join the hands mechanically.  Have the nurses clearer notions of God than the children, whom they compel to pray to Him?