extermination of supposed heresies that many thousands of brave people have been burnt alive; it was with cross in hand that the peaceful natives of America were savagely massacred by the Spaniards; it was in the names of the gods worshipped in Rome that the Christian martyrs suffered the most awful tortures; it was in the name of the Christian God that the fanatics, led by Bishop St. Cyril, stoned the beautiful and learned Hypatia, and that in later times the Bishop of Beauvais led the virgin of Domremy to the stake; it was in the name of the Bible that the kings of God’s “chosen people” savagely exterminated their neighbours; it was in the name of Allah that the standards of Mahomet covered Europe with armies of assassins and that even now millions of fanatics are ready to rise against the Europeans on the cry of a “Holy War,” that Mahomet the Second painted the walls of St. Sophia with the blood of his steed, that Genghis Khan and Tamerlane marked their paths of conquest with pyramids of severed heads; it is to the glory of these imaginary deities that even now so many and useless souls condemn themselves to strange penances in the convents, that the Russian stropzi mutilate themselves, that the howling and dancing Dervishes writhe in mad contortions, that certain sects kill their babies and drink their blood. Religious wars have been the most horrible and odious of all, and the most insensate. People have killed each other for the sake of a word or its interpretation, for the sake of an adjective, for the “consubstantiality” of the Father and the Son of the Trinity, for “homoousios” against “homoiousios,” for a thousand other crotchets placed above the most elementary reason and proclaimed articles of faith in the name of a God! This symbol of the oppressions of peoples, of murder and robbery, this infamous being, does not exist, and has never existed.