It is strange that Man, still in a coarse, savage, and barbarous state, hardly emerged from the primitive shell of ignorance, incapable of knowing even his own body, hardly able to spell the great book of the universe, should have considered himself capable of describing God. He does not know his own little ant-heap and he pretends to discover the unknowable. At a time when nothing was known, when astronomy, physics, chemistry, natural history, and anthropology were as yet unborn, when the feeble and meandering human mind was still surrounded by illusions and errors, human audacity conceived the so-called religions and the gods placed at their heads. That Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, or Mahomet should have striven to give to mankind a code of morals destined to deliver them from barbarism and to teach them the idea of good, such efforts and achievements cannot but receive the homage and admiration of all who value the intellectual and moral progress of humanity. That the founders and organisers of religious rites should place at the head of every cult an ideal, an inviolable being in whose name they pretend to govern, even that can be recognised as a work of social utility, of a value not rising above the worldly standard, and having no object beyond the general good of man and societies. But that those gods invented by man should be considered as really existing, and in an absolutely imaginary heaven which perished in the first conquests of astronomy, that they should have been, and are still, adored by a certain portion of the human race, and that even in our time legislators of all nations dare to base their politics on divine right, to show the “finger of God” in the most monstrous plagues of the social body, and decorate their battle-flags with a local providence, as in the time of Joan of Arc, of Constantine, or of David--that is the shocking anachronism, a mixture of imposture and credulity, of hypocrisy and stupidity unworthy of the era of sincere and positive research in which we live, and which should load the functionaries who live at the expense of such a system with the contempt of every independent man. Definitions are misleading. Were pagans like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, not more spiritual than Pope Alexander the Sixth or Cardinal Dubois, who were true atheists?