Nos prêtres ne sont point ce qu’un vain peuple pense; Notre crédulité fait toute leur science.[20] And the words of Araspe in the same play had breathed the full spirit of the future liberator: Ne nous fions qu’à nous; voyons tout par nos yeux: Ce sont là nos trépieds, nos oracles, nos dieux.[21] Such expressions, however, were no more than the vague and casual word of the _esprit fort_, the friend of Chaulieu, and the rhymer of a dissolute circle, where religion only became tinged with doubt, because conduct had already become penetrated with licence. More important than such stray words was the Epistle to Uranie (1722), that truly masculine and terse protest against the popular creed, its mean and fatuous and contradictory idea of an omnipotent God, who gave us guilty hearts so as to have the right of punishing us, and planted in us a love of pleasure so as to torment us the more effectually by appalling ills that an eternal miracle prevents from ever ending; who drowned the fathers in the deluge and then died for the children; who exacts an account of their ignorance from a hundred peoples whom he has himself plunged helplessly into this ignorance: Je ne reconnais point à cette indigne image Le dieu que je dois adorer; Je croirais le déshonorer Par une telle insulte et par un tel hommage.[22] Though called The For and Against, the poet hardly tries to maintain any proportion between the two sides of the argument. The verses were addressed to a lady in a state of uncertainty as to belief, of whom there were probably more among Voltaire’s friends of quality than he can have cared to cure or convert. Scepticism was at this time not much more than an interesting fashion.