Yes, I wish you to be a new Epicurus, and to teach the men of to-day what my friend taught long ago to the Athenians. Apostles have spoken in my name who have succeeded in spreading over the earth a doctrine of despair. They taught the scorn of all that is human, of all that is genial, of all that is luminous. Unfitted for natural pleasures, they sought pleasure in their own misery and in the misery in which they plunged their brothers. They called the earth a valley of tears, but the tears were those whose abundant flow was caused by their own malignity. Baleful to themselves, they were baleful to the men who became the slaves of their sombre dreams. After promising their faithful an eternity of chimerical joys in return for the true and simple joys they stole from them, they took even hope from the heart of man, they imagined hell. Sons of the ancient priests of Baal, they set up in my name the cruel idol of their fathers, and made of me the hideous and prescient creator of those whose destiny was damnation. These monsters, however, did not discourage me, and I sustained by my inspiration every effort of natural wisdom that I saw among all these horrors. Alas! They hold you yet, and those who combat them, different priests, are sometimes priests more baleful still. Your morality is to-day the lowest and the saddest that has ever reigned. The external hell, in which you now scarcely believe, has entered into your hearts, where it devours all your joys. I Yes, we are sad. In us, the fear of sin has survived the belief in sin. We dare not enjoy anything. We scorn the man who sits down in the sunlight to drink the first rays of the Spring, but while we scorn him we envy him his baseness, for we call all unproductive leisure base. When we can no longer work, we go and watch those who are working. HE Your social state is an exhibition of madness. The Roman slaves had a life less hard than that of many of your work-people. After the Semitic fashion, you make even the women work! Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure. You give to work all the hours of your days, some to get bread, others to achieve a pleasure that fatigue prevents them from enjoying, and others again, the maddest of all, to increase their wealth. You have reached that degree of imbecility in which labour is looked upon as not only honourable but sacred, when, actually, it is but a sad necessity. You have lifted this necessity to the rank of the virtues, when it is, without doubt, no more than the vice of a perverted being for whom life, short as it is, is only a lengthy tedium. I And of this work, which at least allows us to breathe and to eat, there is not enough for all. Thousands of beings in the most civilised towns die every day of hunger, and with a slow death. They are in agony for ten, for twenty years ... HE