That passion which in common life is termed, anger, fury, vengeance or delirium, becomes zeal as soon as its object is religion, or the cause of God. It is a maxim among Christian devotees, that we cannot love God too much, consequently we cannot sin in excess of zeal. According to these principles, our doctors in their quarrels, injure, defame, calumniate, and asperse, and when they have the power, persecute and exterminate each other. Each sect, firmly persuaded that it is in the right, and that its peculiar way of thinking is the only one that God can approve, thinks itself justified in destroying the opinions of its adversaries, which displeasing to itself, must consequently displease the divinity. Thus in attentively examining the thing, we find that religious zeal is nothing but anger, excited in a bigot by opinions adverse to his own, or those of the party he has espoused. In a word, zeal is the gall which contradiction secretes in the souls of bigots. There can be no doubt, but that St. Paul has left a model of this sort, which our evangelical doctors, have in all times faithfully copied. If this great Apostle did not go to the extent of persecuting those who resisted his arguments, or refused blindly to submit to his supreme decisions, it is because he was not sufficiently strong; otherwise judging from the warmth of his temperament we may reasonably presume, that he would have been easily carried to extremities, well calculated to justify the holy passion to which the heads of the church have since given themselves up on all occasions, when they have had sufficient power to give a lustre to their zeal. In fact we find, that Paul's self love, did not suffer contradiction with too much patience. He delivers over to Satan those who refuse to obey him, he pretended that any other Gospel, than his own, was abominable. "I marvel that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel." He pretends and affirms that he alone taught the true doctrine, and that all others are impostors, false prophets, and disturbers; we are obliged to believe on his own word that he possesses infallibility.