Cicero does not say that Mercury incited Verres to rob Sicily, though, in the fable, Mercury had stolen Apollo's cows. The real religion of the ancients was that Jupiter, most good and just, with the secondary divinities, punished perjury in the infernal regions. Thus, the Romans were long the most religious observers of their oaths. It was in no wise ordained that they should believe in Leda's two eggs, in the transformation of Inachus's daughter into a cow, or in Apollo's love for Hyacinthus. Therefore it must not be said that the religion of Numa was dishonoring to the Divinity. So that, as but too often happens, there has been a long dispute about a chimera. Then, it is asked, can a people of atheists exist? I consider that a distinction must be made between the people, properly so called, and a society of philosophers above the people. It is true that, in every country, the populace require the strongest curb; and that if Bayle had had but five or six hundred peasants to govern, he would not have failed to announce to them a rewarding and avenging God. But Bayle would have said nothing about them to the Epicureans, who were people of wealth, fond of quiet, cultivating all the social virtues, and friendship in particular, shunning the dangers and embarrassments of public affairs--leading, in short, a life of ease and innocence. The dispute, so far as it regards policy and society, seems to me to end here. As for people entirely savage, they can be counted neither among the theists nor among the atheists. To ask them what is their creed would be like asking them if they are for Aristotle or Democritus. They know nothing; they are no more atheists than they are peripatetics. But, it may be insisted, that they live in society, though they have no God, and that, therefore, society may subsist without religion. In this case I shall reply that wolves live so; and that an assemblage of barbarous cannibals, as you suppose them to be, is not a society. And, further, I will ask you if, when you have lent your money to any one of your society, you would have neither your debtor, nor your attorney, nor your notary, nor your judge, believe in a God? SECTION II. _Modern Atheists.--Arguments of the Worshippers of God._ We are intelligent beings, and intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a blind, brute, insensible being; there is certainly some difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's intelligence, then, came from some other intelligence. When we see a fine machine, we say there is a good machinist, and that he has an excellent understanding. The world is assuredly an admirable machine; therefore there is in the world, somewhere or other, an admirable intelligence. This argument is old, but is not therefore the worse.