I have one very important thing to tell you. I am persuaded that you are in a great error, but I am equally convinced that you are honest in your self-delusion. You would have men virtuous even without a God, although you have unfortunately said that "so soon as vice renders man happy, he must love vice"—a frightful proposition, which your friends should have prevailed on you to erase. Everywhere else you inspire probity. This philosophical dispute will be only between you and a few philosophers scattered over Europe; the rest of the earth will not even hear of it. The people do not read us. If some theologian were to seek to persecute us, he would be impudent as well as wicked; he would but serve to confirm you, and to make new atheists.
You are wrong: but the Greeks did not persecute Epicurus; the Romans did not persecute Lucretius. You are wrong: but your genius and your virtue must be respected, while you are refuted with all possible strength.
In my opinion, the finest homage that can be rendered to God is to stand forward in His defence without anger; as the most unworthy portrait that can be drawn of Him is to paint Him vindictive and furious. He is truth itself; and truth is without passion. To be a disciple of God is to announce Him as of a mild heart and of an unalterable mind.
I think, with you, that fanaticism is a monster a thousand times more dangerous than philosophical atheism. Spinoza did not commit a single bad action. Châtel and Ravaillac, both devotees, assassinated Henry IV.
The atheist of the closet is almost always a quiet philosopher, while the fanatic is always turbulent: but the court atheist, the atheistical prince, might be the scourge of mankind. Borgia and his like have done almost as much harm as the fanatics of Münster and of the Cévennes. I say the fanatics on both sides. The misfortune is, that atheists of the closet make atheists of the court. It was Chiron who brought up Achilles; he fed him with lion's marrow. Achilles will one day drag Hector's body round the walls of Troy, and immolate twelve captives to his vengeance.
God keep us from an abominable priest who should hew a king in pieces with his sacrificing knife, as also from him who, with a helmet on his head and a cuirass on his back, at the age of seventy, should dare to sign with his three bloody fingers the ridiculous excommunication of a king of France! and from.... and from....
But also, may God preserve us from a choleric and barbarous despot, who, not believing in a God, should be his own God, who should render himself unworthy of his sacred trust by trampling on the duties which that trust imposes, who should remorselessly sacrifice to his passions, his friends, his relatives, his servants, and his people. These two tigers, the one shorn, the other crowned are equally to be feared. By what means shall we muzzle them?....
If the idea of a God has made a Titus or a Trajan, an Antonine or an Aurelius, and those great Chinese emperors, whose memory is so dear to the second of the most ancient and most extensive empires in the world, these examples are sufficient for my cause—and my cause is that of all mankind.
I do not believe that there is in all Europe one statesman, one man at all versed in the affairs of the world, who has not the most profound contempt for the legends with which we have been inundated, even more than we now are with pamphlets. If religion no longer gives birth to civil wars, it is to philosophy alone that we are indebted, theological disputes beginning to be regarded in much the same manner as the quarrels of Punch and Judy at the fair. A usurpation, alike odious and ridiculous, founded upon fraud on one side and stupidity on the other, is every instant undermined by reason, which is establishing its reign. The bull "In cæna Domini"—that masterpiece of insolence and folly, no longer dares appear, even in Rome. If a regiment of monks makes the least evolution against the laws of the state, it is immediately broken. But, because the Jesuits have been expelled, must we also expel God? On the contrary, we must love Him the more.