You say, O Christian philosophers, that the idea of a happier life is delightful; we agree; there is no one who would not desire a more agreeable and a more durable existence than the one we enjoy here below.  But, if Paradise is tempting, you will admit, also, that hell is frightful.  It is very difficult to merit heaven, and very easy to gain hell.  Do you not say that one straight and narrow path leads to the happy regions, and that a broad road leads to the regions of the unhappy?  Do you not constantly tell us that the number of the chosen ones is very small, and that of the damned is very large?  Do we not need, in order to be saved, such grace as your God grants to but few?  Well!  I tell you that these ideas are by no means consoling; I prefer to be annihilated at once rather than to burn forever; I will tell you that the fate of beasts appears to me more desirable than the fate of the damned; I will tell you that the belief which delivers me from overwhelming fears in this world, appears to me more desirable than the uncertainty in which I am left through belief in a God who, master of His favors, gives them but to His favorites, and who permits all the others to render themselves worthy of eternal punishments.  It can be but blind enthusiasm or folly that can prefer a system which evidently encourages improbable conjectures, accompanied by uncertainty and desolating fear.

CIX.—­All religious principles are imaginary.  Innate sense is but the effect of A rooted habit.  God is an idle fancy, and the qualities which are lavished upon him destroy each other.

All religious principles are a thing of imagination, in which experience and reason have nothing to do.  We find much difficulty in conquering them, because imagination, when once occupied in creating chimeras which astonish or excite it, is incapable of reasoning.  He who combats religion and its phantasies by the arms of reason, is like a man who uses a sword to kill flies:  as soon as the blow is struck, the flies and the fancies return to the minds from which we thought to have banished them.

As soon as we refuse the proofs which theology pretends to give of the existence of a God, they oppose to the arguments which destroy them, an innate conviction, a profound persuasion, an invincible inclination inherent in every man, which brings to him, in spite of himself, the idea of an Almighty being which he can not altogether expel from his mind, and which he is compelled to recognize in spite of the strongest reasons that we can give him.  But if we wish to analyze this innate conviction, upon which so much weight is placed, we will find that it is but the effect of a rooted habit, which, making them close their eyes against the most demonstrative proofs, leads the majority of men, and often the most enlightened ones, back to the prejudices of childhood.  What can this innate sense or this ill-founded persuasion prove against the evidence which shows us that what implies contradiction can not exist?