§ I.
On the Comparison so Often Made between Atheism and Idolatry.

It seems to me that, in the “Dictionnaire Encyclopédique,” a more powerful refutation might have been brought against the Jesuit Richeome’s opinion concerning atheists and idolaters — an opinion formerly maintained by St. Thomas, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Cyprian, and Tertullian — an opinion which Arnobius placed in a strong light when he said to the pagans, “Do you not blush to reproach us with contempt for your gods? Is it not better to believe in no god than to impute to them infamous actions?”— an opinion long before established by Plutarch, who stated that he would rather have it said that there was no Plutarch than that there was a Plutarch, inconstant, choleric, and vindictive — an opinion, too, fortified by all the dialectical efforts of Bayle.

Such is the ground of dispute, placed in a very striking point of view by the Jesuit Richeome, and made still more specious by the way in which Bayle sets it off:

“There are two porters at the door of a house. You ask to speak to the master. He is not at home, answers one. He is at home, answers the other, but is busied in making false money, false contracts, daggers, and poisons, to destroy those who have only accomplished his designs. The atheist resembles the former of these porters, the pagan the latter. It is then evident that the pagan offends the Divinity more grievously than the atheist.

With the permission of Father Richeome, and that of Bayle himself, this is not at all the state of the question. For the first porter to be like the atheist, he must say, not “My master is not here,” but “I have no master; he who you pretend is my master does not exist. My comrade is a blockhead to tell you that the gentleman is engaged in mixing poisons and wetting poniards to assassinate those who have executed his will. There is no such being in the world.”

Richeome, therefore, has reasoned very ill; and Bayle, in his rather diffuse discourses, has so far forgotten himself as to do Richeome the honor of making a very lame comment upon him.

Plutarch seems to express himself much better, in declaring that he prefers those who say there is no Plutarch to those who assert that Plutarch is unfit for society. Indeed, of what consequence to him was its being said that he was not in the world? But it was of great consequence that his reputation should not be injured. With the Supreme Being it is otherwise.

Still Plutarch does not come to the real point in discussion. It is only asked who most offends the Supreme Being — he who denies Him, or he who disfigures Him? It is impossible to know, otherwise than by revelation, whether God is offended at the vain discourses which men hold about Him.

Philosophers almost always fall unconsciously into the ideas of the vulgar, in supposing that God is jealous of His glory, wrathful, and given to revenge, and in taking rhetorical figures for real ideas. That which interests the whole world is to know whether it is not better to admit a rewarding and avenging God, recompensing hidden good actions, and punishing secret crimes, than to admit no God at all.

Bayle exhausts himself in repeating all the infamous things imputed to the gods of antiquity. His adversaries answer him by unmeaning commonplaces. The partisans and the enemies of Bayle have almost always fought without coming to close quarters. They all agree that Jupiter was an adulterer, Venus a wanton, Mercury a rogue. But this, I conceive, ought not to be considered; the religion of the ancient Romans should be distinguished from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” It is quite certain that neither they nor even the Greeks ever had a temple dedicated to Mercury the Rogue, Venus the Wanton, or Jupiter the Adulterer.

The god whom the Romans called “Deus optimus maximus” — most good, most great — was not believed to have encouraged Clodius to lie with C?sar’s wife, nor C?sar to become the minion of King Nicomedes.

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?
§ 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.

All animated bodies are composed of levers and pulleys, which act according to the laws of mechanics; of liquors, which are kept in perpetual circulation by the laws of hydrostatics; and the reflection that all these beings have sentiment which has no relation to their organization, fills us with wonder.

The motions of the stars, that of our little earth round the sun — all are operated according to the laws of the profoundest mathematics. How could it be that Plato, who knew not one of these laws — the eloquent but chimerical Plato, who said that the foundation of the earth was an equilateral triangle, and that of water a right-angled triangle — the strange Plato, who said there could be but five worlds, because there were but five regular bodies — how, I say, was it that Plato, who was not even acquainted with spherical trigonometry, had nevertheless so fine a genius, so happy an instinct, as to call God the Eternal Geometrician — to feel that there exists a forming Intelligence? Spinoza himself confesses it. It is impossible to controvert this truth, which surrounds us and presses us on all sides.
Argument of the Atheists.

I have, however, known refractory individuals, who have said that there is no forming intelligence, and that motion alone has formed all that we see and all that we are. They say boldly that the combination of this universe was possible because it exists; therefore it was possible for motion of itself to arrange it. Take four planets only — Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the Earth; let us consider them solely in the situations in which they now are; and let us see how many probabilities we have that motion will bring them again to those respective places. There are but twenty-four chances in this combination; that is, it is only twenty-four to one that these planets will not be found in the same situations with respect to one another. To these four globes add that of Jupiter; and it is then only a hundred and twenty to one that Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and our globe will not be placed in the same positions in which we now see them.

Lastly, add Saturn; and there will then be only seven hundred and twenty chances to one against putting these planets in their present arrangement, according to their given distances. It is, then, demonstrated that once, at least, in seven hundred and twenty cases, chance might place these planets in their present order.

Then take all the secondary planets, all their motions, all the beings that vegetate, live, feel, think, act, on all these globes; you have only to increase the number of chances; multiply this number to all eternity — to what our weakness calls infinity — there will still be an unit in favor of the formation of the world, such as it is, by motion alone; therefore it is possible that, in all eternity, the motion of matter alone has produced the universe as it exists. Nay, this combination must, in eternity, of necessity happen. Thus, say they, not only it is possible that the world is as it is by motion alone, but it was impossible that it should not be so after infinite combinations.
Answer.

All this supposition seems to me to be prodigiously chimerical, for two reasons: the first is, that in this universe there are intelligent beings, and you cannot prove it possible for motion alone to produce understanding. The second is, that, by your own confession, the chances are infinity to unity, that an intelligent forming cause produced the universe. Standing alone against infinity, a unit makes but a poor figure.

Again Spinoza himself admits this intelligence; it is the basis of his system. You have not read him, but you must read him. Why would you go further than he, and, through a foolish pride, plunge into the abyss where Spinoza dared not to descend? Are you not aware of the extreme folly of saying that it is owing to a blind cause that the square of the revolution of one planet is always to the squares of the others as the cube of its distance is to the cubes of the distances of the others from the common centre? Either the planets are great geometricians, or the Eternal Geometrician has arranged the planets.

But where is the Eternal Geometrician? Is He in one place, or in all places, without occupying space? I know not. Has He arranged all things of His own substance? I know not. Is He immense, without quantity and without quality? I know not. All I know is, that we must adore Him and be just.
New Objection of a Modern Atheist.

Can it be said that the conformation of animals is according to their necessities? What are those necessities? Self-preservation and propagation. Now, is it astonishing that, of the infinite combinations produced by chance, those only have survived which had organs adapted for their nourishment and the continuation of their species? Must not all others necessarily have perished?
Answer.

This argument, taken from Lucretius, is sufficiently refuted by the sensation given to animals and the intelligence given to man. How, as has just been said in the preceding paragraph, should combinations produced by chance produce this sensation and this intelligence? Yes, doubtless, the members of animals are made for all their necessities with an incomprehensible art, and you have not the boldness to deny it. You do not mention it. You feel that you can say nothing in answer to this great argument which Nature brings against you. The disposition of the wing of a fly, or of the feelers of a snail, is sufficient to confound you.
An Objection of Maupertuis.

The natural philosophers of modern times have done nothing more than extend these pretended arguments; this they have sometimes done even to minuteness and indecency. They have found God in the folds of a rhinoceros’s hide; they might, with equal reason, have denied His existence on account of the tortoise’s shell.
Answer.

What reasoning! The tortoise and the rhinoceros, and all the different species, prove alike in their infinite varieties the same cause, the same design, the same end, which are preservation, generation, and death. Unity is found in this immense variety; the hide and the shell bear equal testimony. What! deny God, because a shell is not like a skin! And journalists have lavished upon this coxcombry praises which they have withheld from Newton and Locke, both worshippers of the Divinity from thorough examination and conviction!
Another of Maupertuis’s Objections.

Of what service are beauty and fitness in the construction of a serpent? Perhaps, you say, it has uses of which we are ignorant. Let us then, at least, be silent, and not admire an animal which we know only by the mischief it does.
Answer.

Be you silent, also, since you know no more of its utility than myself; or acknowledge that, in reptiles, everything is admirably proportioned. Some of them are venomous; you have been so too. The only subject at present under consideration is the prodigious art which has formed serpents, quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and bipeds. This art is evident enough. You ask, Why is not the serpent harmless? And why have you not been harmless? Why have you been a persecutor? which, in a philosopher, is the greatest of crimes. This is quite another question; it is that of physical and moral evil. It has long been asked, Why are there so many serpents, and so many wicked men worse than serpents? If flies could reason, they would complain to God of the existence of spiders; but they would, at the same time, acknowledge what Minerva confessed to Arachne in the fable, that they arrange their webs in a wonderful manner.

We cannot, then, do otherwise than acknowledge an ineffable Intelligence, which Spinoza himself admitted. We must own that it is displayed as much in the meanest insect as in the planets. And with regard to moral and physical evil, what can be done or said? Let us console ourselves by the enjoyment of physical and moral good, and adore the Eternal Being, who has ordained the one and permitted the other.

One word more on this topic. Atheism is the vice of some intelligent men, and superstition is the vice of fools. And what is the vice of knaves? — Hypocrisy.
§ III.
Unjust Accusation. — Justification of Vanini.

Formerly, whoever was possessed of a secret in any art was in danger of passing for a sorcerer; every new sect was charged with murdering infants in its mysteries; and every philosopher who departed from the jargon of the schools was accused of atheism by knaves and fanatics, and condemned by blockheads.

Anaxagorus dares to assert that the sun is not conducted by Apollo, mounted in a chariot and four; he is condemned as an atheist, and compelled to fly.

Aristotle is accused of atheism by a priest, and not being powerful enough to punish his accuser, he retires to Chalcis. But the death of Socrates is the greatest blot on the page of Grecian history.

Aristophanes — he whom commentators admire because he was a Greek, forgetting that Socrates was also a Greek — Aristophanes was the first who accustomed the Athenians to regard Socrates as an atheist.

This comic poet, who is neither comic nor poetical, would not, among us, have been permitted to exhibit his farces at the fair of St. Lawrence. He appears to me to be much lower and more despicable than Plutarch represents him. Let us see what the wise Plutarch says of this buffoon: “The language of Aristophanes bespeaks his miserable quackery; it is made up of the lowest and most disgusting puns; he is not even pleasing to the people; and to men of judgment and honor he is insupportable;............