To reestablish peace in your mind, dear Madam, cease to despise yourself; entertain a just confidence in your own powers of mind, and feel no chagrin at finding yourself infected with a general and involuntary epidemic from which it did not depend on you to escape. The good Abbe de St. Pierre had reason when he said that _devotion was the smallpox of the soul_. I will add that it is rare the disease does not leave its pits for life. Indeed, see how often the most enlightened persons persist forever in the prejudices of their infancy! These notions are so early inculcated, and so many precautions are continually taken to render them durable, that if any thing may reasonably surprise us, it is to see any one have the ability to rise superior to such influences. The most sublime geniuses are often the playthings of superstition. The heat of their imagination sometimes only serves to lead them the farther astray, and to attach them to opinions which would cause them to blush did they but consult their reason. Pascal constantly imagined that he saw hell yawning under his feet; Mallebranche was extravagantly credulous; Hobbes had a great terror of phantoms and demons;* and the immortal Newton wrote a ridiculous commentary on the vials and visions of the Apocalypse. In a word, every thing proves that there is nothing more difficult than to efface the notions with which we are imbued during our infancy. The most sensible persons, and those who reason with the most correctness upon every other matter, relapse into their infancy whenever religion is in question. Thus, Madam, you need not blush for a weakness which you hold in common with almost all the world, and from which the greatest men are not always exempt. Let your courage then revive, and fear not to examine with perfect composure the phantoms which alarm you. In a matter which so greatly interests your repose, consult that enlightened reason which places you as much above the vulgar, as it elevates the human species above the other animals. Far from being suspicious of your own understanding and intellectual faculties, turn your just suspicion against those men, far less enlightened and honest than you, who, to vanquish you, only address themselves to your lively imagination; who have the cruelty to disturb the serenity of your soul; who, under the pretext of attaching you only to heaven, insist that you must sunder the most tender and endearing ties; and in fine, who oblige you to proscribe the use of that beneficent reason whose light guides, your conduct so judiciously and so safely. * On this subject see Bayle's Diet. Critt art. Hobbes, Rem. N.