On the other hand, all religions are entirely founded upon the reciprocal engagements which are supposed to exist between God and his creatures. If God owes nothing to the latter, if he is not under an obligation to fulfil his engagements to them when they have fulfilled theirs to him, of what use is religion? What motives can men have to offer their homage and worship to the Divinity? Why should they feel much desire to love or serve a master who can absolve himself of all duty towards those who entered his service with an expectation of the recompense promised under such circumstances? It is easy to see that the destructive ideas of divine justice which are inculcated are only founded upon a fatal prejudice prevalent among the generality of men, leading them to suppose that unlimited power must inevitably exempt its possessor from an accordance with the laws of equity; that force can confer the right of committing bad actions; and that no one could properly demand an account of his conduct of a man sufficiently powerful to carry out all his caprices. These ideas are evidently borrowed from the conduct of tyrants, who no sooner find themselves possessed of absolute power than they cease to recognize any other rules than their own fantasies, and imagine that justice has no claims upon potentates like them. It is upon this frightful model that theologians have formed that God whom they, notwithstanding, assert to be a just being, while, if the conduct they attribute to him was true, we should be constrained to regard him as the most unjust of tyrants, as the most partial of fathers, as the most fantastic of princes, and, in a word, as a being the most to be feared and the least worthy of love that the imagination could devise. We are informed that the God who created all men has been unwilling to be known except to a very small number of them, and that while this favored portion exclusively enjoyed the benefits of his kindness, all the others were objects of his anger, and were only created by him to be left in blindness for the very purpose of punishing them in the most cruel manner. We see these pernicious characteristics of the Divinity penetrating the entire economy of the Christian religion; we find them in the books which are pretended to be inspired, and we discover them in the dogmas of predestination and grace. In a word, every thing in religion announces a despotic God, whom his disciples vainly attempt to represent to us as just, while all that they declare of him only proves his injustice, his tyrannical caprices, his extravagances, so frequently cruel, and his partiality, so pernicious to the greater portion of the human race. When we exclaim against conduct which, in the eyes of all reasonable men, must appear so excessively capricious, it is expected that our mouths will be closed by the assertion that God is omnipotent, that it is for him to determine how he will bestow