When sovereigns are obedient to it, it favours their tyranny. When they are disobedient, it renders their subjects fanatic and rebellious. When it accords with political power, it convulses, debases, and impoverishes nations; when not, it makes citizens unsocial, turbulent, intolerant, and mutinous. If we examine in detail the precepts of this religion, and the maxims which flow from its principles, we shall find it interdicts every thing that can make a nation flourish. We have already seen the ideas of imperfection that it attaches to marriage, and its esteem of celibacy. These notions are highly unfavourable to population, which is, incontrovertibly, the first source of power in a state. Commerce is not less contradictory to the spirit of a religion, the founder of which pronounced an anathema against riches, and excluded them from his kingdom. All industry is interdicted to perfect Christians; they live a provisory life on earth, and never concern themselves with the morrow. Must it not be a great temerity and sin for a Christian to serve in war? Is not the man, who has never the right to believe himself absolutely in a state of grace, extremely rash when he exposes himself to eternal damnation? Is not the Christian, who ought to have charity for all men, and love even his enemies, guilty of an enormous crime, when he kills a man of whose dispositions he is ignorant, and whom he, perhaps, precipitates at once into hell? A Christian soldier is a monster; unless, indeed, he fights in the cause of religion. Then, if he dies, "he dies a blessed martyr." The Christian religion has always declared war against science and all human knowledge. These have been looked upon as obstacles to salvation. Neither reason nor study are necessary to men, who are to submit their reason to the yoke of faith. From the confession of Christians themselves, the founders of their religion were simple and ignorant men. Their disciples must be as little enlightened as they were to admit the fables and reveries they have received from them. It has always been remarked, that the most enlightened men seldom make the best Christians. Science is apt to embarrass faith; and it moreover turns the attention from the great work of salvation, which is represented as the only necessary one. If science be serviceable to political society, ignorance is much more so to religion and its ministers.. Those ages, destitute of science and industry, were the garden age of the church of Christ. Then were kings dutifully submissive to priests; then the coffers of priests held all the riches of society. The priests of a very numerous sect have kept from the eyes of their followers even the sacred pages which contain the laws of their religion. This conduct is, undoubtedly, very discreet. Reading the Bible is the surest of all means to prevent its being respected.