Ye credulous people! In your misfortunes, redouble your prayers, offerings, and sacrifices; throng to your temples; fast in sack-cloth and ashes; bathe yourselves in your own tears; and above all, completely ruin yourselves to enrich your gods! You will only enrich their priests. The gods of heaven will be propitious, only when the gods of the earth shall acknowledge themselves, men, like you, and shall devote to your welfare the attention you deserve.
148.
Negligent, ambitious, and perverse Princes are the real causes of public misfortunes. Useless, unjust Wars depopulate the earth. Encroaching and despotic Governments absorb the benefits of nature. The rapacity of Courts discourages agriculture, extinguishes industry, produces want, pestilence and misery. Heaven is neither cruel nor propitious to the prayers of the people; it is their proud chiefs, who have almost always hearts of stone.
It is destructive to the morals of princes, to persuade them that they have God alone to fear, when they injure their subjects, or neglect their happiness. Sovereigns! It is not the gods, but your people, that you offend, when you do evil. It is your people and yourselves that you injure, when you govern unjustly.
In history, nothing is more common than to see Religious Tyrants; nothing more rare than to find equitable, vigilant, enlightened princes. A monarch may be pious, punctual in a servile discharge of the duties of his religion, very submissive and liberal to his priests, and yet at the same time be destitute of every virtue and talent necessary for governing. To princes, Religion is only an instrument destined to keep the people more completely under the yoke. By the excellent principles of religious morality, a tyrant who, during a long reign, has done nothing but oppress his subjects, wresting, from them the fruits of their labour, sacrificing them without mercy to his insatiable ambition,—a conqueror, who has usurped the provinces of others, slaughtered whole nations, and who, during his whole life, has been a scourge to mankind,—imagines his conscience may rest, when, to expiate so many crimes, he has wept at the feet of a priest, who generally has the base complaisance to console and encourage a robber, whom the most hideous despair would too lightly punish for the misery he has caused upon earth.
149.
A sovereign, sincerely devout, is commonly dangerous to the state. Credulity always supposes a contracted mind; devotion generally absorbs the attention, which a prince should pay to the government of his people. Obsequious to the suggestions of his priests, he becomes the sport of their caprices, the favourer of their quarrels, and the instrument and accomplice of their follies, which he imagines to be of the greatest importance. Among the most fatal presents, which religion has made the world, ought to be reckoned those devout and zealous monarchs, who, under an idea of working for the welfare of their subjects, have made it a sacred duty to torment, persecute, and destroy those, who thought differently from themselves. A bigot, at the head of an empire, is one of the greatest scourges. A single fanatical or knavish priest, listened to by a credulous and powerful prince, suffices to put a state in disorder.
In almost all countries, priests and pious persons are intrusted with forming the minds and hearts of young princes, destined to govern nations. What qualifications have instructors of this stamp! By what interests can they be animated? Full of prejudices themselves, they will teach their pupil to regard superstition, as most important and sacred; its chimerical duties, as most indispensable, intolerance and persecution, as the true foundation of his future authority. They will endeavour to make him a party leader, a turbulent fanatic, a tyrant; they will early stifle his reason, and forewarn him against the use of it; they will prevent truth from reaching his ears; they will exasperate him against true talents, and prejudice him in favour of contemptible ones; in short, they will make him a weak devotee, who will have no idea either of justice or injustice, nor of true glory, nor of true greatness, and who will be destitute of the knowledge and virtues necessary to the government of a great nation. Such is the plan of the education of a child, destined one day to create the happiness or misery of millions of men!