All the Gods worshiped by men have a barbarous origin; they were visibly imagined by stupid nations, or were presented by ambitious and cunning legislators to simple and benighted people, who had neither the capacity nor the courage to examine properly the object which, by means of terrors, they were made to worship.  In examining closely the God which we see adored still in our days by the most civilized nations, we are compelled to acknowledge that He has evidently barbarous features.  To be barbarous is to recognize no right but force; it is being cruel to excess; it is but following one’s own caprice; it is a lack of foresight, of prudence, and reason.  Nations, who believe yourselves civilized! do you not perceive this frightful character of the God to whom you offer your incense?  The pictures which are drawn of Divinity, are they not visibly borrowed from the implacable, jealous, vindictive, blood-thirsty, capricious, inconsiderate humor of man, who has not yet cultivated his reason?  Oh, men! you worship but a great savage, whom you consider as a model to follow, as an amiable master, as a perfect sovereign.

The religious opinions of men in every country are antique and durable monuments of ignorance credulity, of the terrors and the ferocity of their ancestors.  Every barbarian is a child thirsting for the wonderful, which he imbibes with pleasure, and who never reasons upon that which he finds proper to excite his imagination; his ignorance of the ways of nature makes him attribute to spirits, to enchantments, to magic, all that appears to him extraordinary; in his eyes his priests are sorcerers, in whom he supposes an Almighty power; before whom his confused reason humiliates itself, whose oracles are for him infallible decrees, to contradict which would be dangerous.  In matters of religion the majority of men have remained in their primitive barbarity.  Modern religions are but follies of old times rejuvenated or presented in some new form.  If the ancient barbarians have worshiped mountains, rivers, serpents, trees, fetishes of every kind; if the wise Egyptians worshiped crocodiles, rats, onions, do we not see nations who believe themselves wiser than they, worship with reverence a bread, into which they imagine that the enchantments of their priests cause the Divinity to descend?  Is not the God-bread the fetish of many Christian nations, as little rational in this point as that of the most barbarous nations?

CXXI.—­ALL RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES BEAR THE SEAL OF STUPIDITY OR BARBARITY.

In all times the ferocity, the stupidity, the folly of savage men were shown in religious customs which were often cruel and extravagant.  A spirit of barbarity has come down to our days; it intrudes itself into the religions which are followed by the most civilized nations.  Do we not still see human victims offered to Divinity?  In order to appease the wrath of a God whom we suppose as ferocious, as jealous, as vindictive, as a savage, do not sanguinary laws cause the destruction of those who are believed to have displeased Him by their way of thinking?