hard to find the best books on the opposite side in any one country, and all the harder to find those on all sides; when found they would be easily answered.  The absent are always in the wrong, and bad arguments boldly asserted easily efface good arguments put forward with scorn.  Besides books are often very misleading, and scarcely express the opinions of their authors.  If you think you can judge the Catholic faith from the writings of Bossuet, you will find yourself greatly mistaken when you have lived among us.  You will see that the doctrines with which Protestants are answered are quite different from those of the pulpit.  To judge a religion rightly, you must not study it in the books of its partisans, you must learn it in their lives; this is quite another matter.  Each religion has its own traditions, meaning, customs, prejudices, which form the spirit of its creed, and must be taken in connection with it.

“How many great nations neither print books of their own nor read ours!  How shall they judge of our opinions, or we of theirs?  We laugh at them, they despise us; and if our travellers turn them into ridicule, they need only travel among us to pay us back in our own coin.  Are there not, in every country, men of common-sense, honesty, and good faith, lovers of truth, who only seek to know what truth is that they may profess it?  Yet every one finds truth in his own religion, and thinks the religion of other nations absurd; so all these foreign religions are not so absurd as they seem to us, or else the reason we find for our own proves nothing.

“We have three principal forms of religion in Europe.  One accepts one revelation, another two, and another three.  Each hates the others, showers curses on them, accuses them of blindness, obstinacy, hardness of heart, and falsehood.  What fair-minded man will dare to decide between them without first carefully weighing their evidence, without listening attentively to their arguments?  That which accepts only one revelation is the oldest and seems the best established; that which accepts three is the newest and seems the most consistent; that which accepts two revelations and rejects the third may perhaps be the best, but prejudice is certainly against it; its inconsistency is glaring.

“In all three revelations the sacred books are written in languages unknown to the people who believe in them.  The Jews no longer understand Hebrew, the Christians understand neither Hebrew nor Greek; the Turks and Persians do not understand Arabic, and the Arabs of our time do not speak the language of Mahomet.  Is not it a very foolish way of teaching, to teach people in an unknown tongue?  These books are translated, you say.  What an answer!  How am I to know that the translations are correct, or how am I to make sure that such a thing as a correct translation is possible?  If God has gone so far as to speak to men, why should he require an interpreter?