§ 7.
Jesus Christ being a Jew, and consequently imbued with these opinions, we need not be surprised when we meet in the gospels and the writing of his disciples the words Devil, Satan, and Hell, as if they were anything real or substantive. We have showed before that there can be nothing more chimerical; but although what was said might suffice to satisfy rational men, we are not the less necessitated to add a few words, in an attempt to convince the bigotted.
All Christians agree that God is the source of everything; that he created all things—that he sustains them, and that without his support they would drop into annihilation.—From these principles, it is certain that he created that being whom they call the Devil, or Satan. Whether he were created good or evil is nothing to the argument; he is incontestibly the work of the great Head, and if he continue to exist, all wicked as they represent him to be, it must only be at the good pleasure of God. Now, how is it possible to conceive that God would preserve one of his creatures, who not only hates him mortally, and blasphemes him without end, but who sets himself to seduce the friends of the Almighty for the sole purpose of mortifying him. How is it possible, I repeat, that God can permit this Devil to exist, who turns aside from his worship the favored and the elect, and who would dethrone him were it in his power?
This is what we wish to say in speaking of God, or rather in speaking of the Devil and Hell. If God is almighty, and if nothing can happen without his permission, how comes it that the devil hates him, blasphemes him, and seduces his worshippers? The Deity either consents to this or he does not. If he consents to it, the Devil in blaspheming him is only doing his duty, since he can do nothing but what God wishes, and consequently it is not the Devil, but God himself who blasphemes himself,—a fearfully absurd supposition. If he does not consent to it he cannot be omnipotent, and there must be two principles, the one of good, and the other of evil—the one aiming at one thing, and the other at its direct opposite.
To what then leads our reasoning? To this; that neither God, nor the Devil, nor Paradise, nor Hell, nor the Soul, are such as religion has represented them to be, and as most reverend divines have maintained. These latter sell their fables for truths, being people of bad faith who abuse the credulity of the ignorant by making them believe whatever they please; as if the vulgar were absolutely unfitted to hear the truth and could be nourished by nothing but those absurdities, in which a rational mind can only discover a vast of nothing, and a waste of folly.
The world has been long infected with these most absurd opinions, yet in every age men have been found—truth-loving men—who have striven against the absurdities of their day. This little treatise has been written from like motives, and in it the lovers of truth will doubtless meet with some things satisfactory. It is to them that I appeal, caring little for the opinion of those who substitute their own prejudices in place of infallible oracles.
Happy the man, who, studying Nature’s laws,
Through known effects can trace the secret cause;
His mind possessing in a quiet state,