In the greatest calamities, do not devout persons, through a ridiculous simplicity, or rather a sensible contradiction in terms, exclaim, that _the Almighty is master_. Thus, inconsistent reasoners, believe, that the _Almighty_ (a Being, one of whose first attributes is goodness,) sends you pestilence, war, and famine! You believe that the _Almighty_, this good being, has the will and right to inflict the greatest evils, you can bear! Cease, at least, to call your God _good_, when he does you evil; say not, that he is just, say that he is the strongest, and that it is impossible for you to ward off the blows of his caprice. _God_, say you, _chastises only for our good_. But what real good can result to a people from being exterminated by the plague, ravaged by wars, corrupted by the examples of perverse rulers, continually crushed under the iron sceptre of a succession of merciless tyrants, annihilated by the scourges of a bad government, whose destructive effects are often felt for ages? If chastisements are good, then they cannot have too much of a good thing! _The eyes of faith_ must be strange eyes, if with them they see advantages in the most dreadful calamities, in the vices and follies with which our species are afflicted. 90. What strange ideas of divine justice must Christians have, who are taught to believe, that their God, in view of reconciling to himself the human race, guilty, though unconscious, of the sin of their fathers, has put to death his own son, who was innocent and incapable of sinning? What should we say of a king, whose subjects should revolt, and who, to appease himself, should find no other expedient than to put to death the heir of his crown, who had not participated in the general rebellion? "It is," the Christian will say, "through goodness to his subjects, unable of themselves to satisfy divine justice, that God has consented to the cruel death of his son." But the goodness of a father to strangers does not give him the right of being unjust and barbarous to his own son. All the qualities, which theology ascribes to God, reciprocally destroy one another. The exercise of one of his perfections is always at the expense of the exercise of another. Has the Jew more rational ideas of divine justice than the Christian? The pride of a king kindles the anger of heaven; _Jehovah_ causes the pestilence to descend upon his innocent people; seventy thousand subjects are exterminated to expiate the fault of a monarch, whom the goodness of God resolved to spare. 91.