** The Jews may be regarded as an exception; for their history displays the most memorable examples of the evils arising from superstition and fanaticism; from these arose the numerous revolutions, the horrid and bloody wars; and at last their total destruction as a petty dependent nation, owing to their submission to priests, and their unbounded credulity. From the roguish deceptions of their tribe of priests alone, they became, beyond all contradiction, the most despicable people that ever existed. Their barbarous ignorance was easily played upon by Levitical commissions from heaven. In proof of this, witness the gibbets, the wheels, the massacres, and the horrible burnings at the stake of nearly a hundred thousand human beings in a single province--the massacres and devastations of nine mad crusades of Christians against unoffending Turks, during nearly two hundred years; in which many millions of human beings perished--the massacres of the Anabaptists--the massacres of the Lutherans and Papists, from the Rhine to the extremities of the north--the massacres, in Ireland, England, and Scotland, in the time of Charles I., who was himself massacred--the massacres ordered by Henry VIII. and his daughter Mary--the massacres of St. Bartholomew in France; and forty years more of other massacres between the time of Francis I. and the entry of Henry IV. into Paris;--the massacres of the inquisition, which are more execrable still, as being judicially committed;--to say nothing of the innumerable schisms and twenty wars of popes against popes--bishops against bishops--the poisonings, assassinations--the cruel rapines of more than a dozen of popes, who far exceeded a Nero or a Caligula in every species of crime and wickedness;--the massacre of twelve millions of the inhabitants of the new world, executed CRUCIFIX IN HAND and all for the honor and glory of the Jewish deity and his son!! This is without reckoning all the massacres committed in the same names, precedently to any of the above. Finding no end to this dismal catalogue of theological enormities, this philosopher shortly observes, that such a hideous and almost uninterrupted chain of religious wars, for fourteen centuries, never subsisted but among Christians; and that none of all the numerous nations called heathen ever spilt a drop of human blood on the score of theological arguments. * Under the banners and sanction of the exterminating god of Moses and of Joshua, "the Spaniards did not treat the inhabitants of the New World as human beings, because they were not Christians. All sense of remorse was stifled; and those unfeeling men, whom Europe had disgorged from her bosom, were abandoned without control to their insatiable thirst for gold and for blood."