This philosopher plainly gives us his secret, which has been, and still is, the secret of all legislators and priests. True, the belief of these fables has restrained many from vice and crime; nevertheless we firmly believe that men ought to be led to justice by the bright light of the truth, and not by the dismal light of error, and of superstition: the one elevates man, but the other keeps him in an eternal infancy and ignorance. How sad it is to see, even now-a-days, in free and enlightened America, priests, and Protestant ministers themselves, keeping down in intellectual, moral and religious bondage, millions of Christians, who, from fear of endless curse, kiss the very chains which heavily they drag through life; who believe that God will endlessly roast men--his children--in an undying fire! More surely, and more easily, could those purely minded, but unfortunate Christians, be guided to love God, if they knew that he is not worse than a tiger; that, on the contrary, he is truly good and loving; more virtuous they would be if they were taught that virtue is the source, and the only true source, of happiness. Truer fraternity would reign in our communities, if priests and pretended Protestants, who tyrannize over the souls of their misled victims, and, like the Pharisees of old, lay upon their shoulders a burden they would not be willing to touch with their own fingers--yea, they lay upon their mind and heart the leaden weight of the dogma of endless misery, which they, at least the leaders of the leaders, reject--truer fraternity would exist, we say, for there would not be in our communities, a class of Christians, believing that they are the elect of God for righteousness and eternal bliss, while all the others shall be endlessly damned. Hence their indifference, or rather aversion for them; hence a spirit of Pharisaism: hence a spirit of religious aristocracy, which unfortunately ramifies into a social aristocracy! ARTICLE II. _Tartarus._ When legislators, priests and philosophers had invented the doctrine of Metempsychosis, the mystagogues and the poets took hold of it, and endeavored to spread it among the people, in consecrating it, the ones in their chants, and the others in the celebration of their mysteries. They clothed it with the charms of poetry, and presented it with magical illusions. All united to deceive the people, under the specious pretext of bettering and governing them with a surer hand. The widest field was opened to fictions; and the genius of the poets, as well as the cunning of the priests, were inexhaustible in portraying the bliss of the righteous hereafter, and the horror of the horrible prisons wherein crime was to be punished.