by the wizard influence of the church; yet, owing to the decayed, and rapidly decaying, power of this incubus, these dominions enjoy more liberty than Spain,*** which for many centuries has had no other executive rule than the most oppressive and irksome superstition that ever degraded and enslaved the human race; and whose sons are at this moment pouring out their blood in the endeavor to pull out the teeth, and curtail the claws, if they cannot kill, the monster. * Plato states that religious pretences have always formed one of the most powerful frauds of political despotism; and Aristotle calls the profession of religion not only the surest auxiliary of tyrants, but an enslaving tyranny in itself. ** Divines say that Nature is wholly inexplicable without a god; that is, to explain what they know very little of, they have recourse to a cause which they know not at all. *** For many centuries past, the finest countries in Europe, via., Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, have been nothing but theological beargardens, and so they are to this day. The history of all religions, we repeat, is but a catalogue of follies, knavery, cruelty, and crime; the whole forming a continued libel upon mankind, and proving their ignorance and unbounded credulity; the tyrant, confederate with the priest, assists him to impose upon you his creed, on the strength of which he demands your faith, on the strength of which he "_demands your money_"--not at the point of the bayonet, in the first instance, but if you refuse to _deliver_, he calls in the aid of his political partner, whom he has ever taught you "to obey in all things;" so that, between the priest and "the powers that be," your money is extorted, though not by a highwayman. The iniquity of compelling a man to support an idle and rapacious order of theologians, whom he wishes to have nothing to do with, is an act of injustice too shameful to be committed by any wise and good government. Since we can distinctly trace priestcraft so far back as the times of Hesiod and Homer, to talk of its origin would be as futile and unprofitable, as it would be to speak of the first evil amongst men; if the two are not necessarily coeval, certainly the cup of the latter was not full until the former filled up the measure. And, as "things naturally bad make strong themselves by ill," tyrannical governments have been enabled, through collusion with this baleful pest, to carry their oppressions to the highest pitch of profligacy and wickedness; and for a quiet submission to the degradation and miseries thus occasioned in real life, the dupes are promised a blissful remuneration, in an imaginary _post mortem life_, created for this express purpose. But every endeavor to open the eyes of the deceived, or to remove the evils arising from this mischievous confederacy, is threatened with a life of everlasting burning after death.*