The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the established notions of morality, and utterly to destroy religion.  Reward and punishment must be considered, by the Necessarian, merely as motives which he would employ in order to procure the adoption or abandonment of any given line of conduct.  Desert, in the present sense of the word, would no longer have any meaning; and he who should inflict pain upon another for no better reason than that he deserved it, would only gratify his revenge under pretence of satisfying justice?  It is not enough, says the advocate of free-will, that a criminal should be prevented from a repetition of his crime:  he should feel pain, and his torments, when justly inflicted, ought precisely to be proportioned to his fault.  But utility is morality; that which is incapable of producing happiness is useless; and though the crime of Damiens must be condemned, yet the frightful torments which revenge, under the name of justice, inflicted on this unhappy man cannot be supposed to have augmented, even at the long run, the stock of pleasurable sensation in the world.  At the same time, the doctrine of Necessity does not in the least diminish our disapprobation of vice.  The conviction which all feel that a viper is a poisonous animal, and that a tiger is constrained, by the inevitable condition of his existence, to devour men, does not induce us to avoid them lass sedulously, or, even more, to hesitate in destroying them:  but he would surely be of a hard heart who, meeting with a serpent on a desert island, or in a situation where it was incapable of injury, should wantonly deprive it of existence.  A Necessarian is inconsequent to his own principles if he indulges in hatred or contempt; the compassion which he feels for the criminal is unmixed with a desire of injuring him:  he looks with an elevated and dreadless composure upon the links of the universal chain as they pass before his eyes; whilst cowardice, curiosity, and inconsistency only assail him in proportion to the feebleness and indistinctness with which he has perceived and rejected the delusions of free-will.

Religion is the perception of the relation in which we stand to the principle of the universe.  But if the principle of the universe be not an organic being, the model and prototype of man, the relation between it and human beings is absolutely none.  Without some insight into its will respecting our actions religion is nugatory and vain.  But will is only a mode of animal mind; moral qualities also are such as only a human being can possess; to attribute them to the principle of the universe is to annex to it properties incompatible with any possible definition of its nature.  It is probable that the word God was originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known events which men perceived in the universe.  By the vulgar mistake of a metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man, endowed with human qualities and governing the universe as an earthly monarch governs his kingdom.  Their addresses to this imaginary being, indeed, are much in the same style as those of subjects to a king.  They acknowledge his benevolence, deprecate his anger, and supplicate his favour.