Claude Adrian Helvetius was born at Paris 1715, and died December, 1771. His best known works are “De l’Esprit,” published 1758: “Essai sur l’Origine des Connaissances Humaines,” 1746; “Traite des Systemes,” 1749; “Traite des Sensations,” 1758. Rousseau wrote in reply to Helvetius, but when the Parliament of Paris condemned the work “De l’Esprit,” and it was in consequence burned by the common hangman, Rousseau withdrew his refutatory volume. Helvetius argues that any religion, of which the chiefs are intolerant, and the conduct of which is expensive to the state, “cannot long be the religion of an enlightened and well governed nation. The people that submit to it will labor only to maintain the ease and luxury of the priesthood; each of its inhabitants will be nothing more than a slave to the sacerdotal power. A religion to be good should be tolerant and little expensive. Its clergy should have no authority over the people. A dread of the priest debases the mind and the soul, makes the one brutish and the other slavish. Must the ministers of the altar always be armed with the sword of the State? Can the barbarities committed by their intolerance ever be forgotten? The earth is yet drenched with the blood they have spilled. Civil tolerance alone is not sufficient to secure the peace of nations. Every dogma is a seed of discord and injustice sown amongst mankind.” “Why do you make the Supreme Being resemble an eastern tyrant? Why make him punish slight faults with eternal torment? Why thus put the name of the Divinity at the bottom of the portrait of the devil? Why oppress the soul with a load of fear, break its springs, and of a worshipper of Jesus make a vile, pusillanimous slave? It is the malignant who paint a malignant God. What is their devotion? A veil for their crimes.” “Let not the rewards of heaven be made the price of trifling religious operations, which convey a diminutive idea of the Eternal and a false conception of virtue; its rewards should never be assigned to fasting, haircloth, a blind submission, and self-castigation. The men who place these operations among the virtues, might as well place those of leaping, dancing, and tumbling on the rope.” “Humility may be held in veneration by the dwellers in a monastery or a convent, it favors the meanness and idleness of a monastic life. But ought humility to be regarded as the virtue of the people? No.” Speaking of the Pagan systems, Helvetius says: “All the fables of mythology were mere emblems of certain principles of nature.”