When men have not true notions of the Deity, false ideas must supply their place, like as in troublesome and calamitous times we are obliged to trade with base money when good is not to be procured. The heathens were afraid of committing crimes, lest they should be punished by their false gods. The Malabar dreads the anger of his pagods. Wherever there is a fixed community, religion is necessary; the laws are a curb upon open crimes, and religion upon private ones.
But when once men have embraced a pure and holy religion, superstition then becomes not only needless, but very hurtful. Those whom God has been pleased to nourish with bread ought not to be fed upon acorns.
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the foolish daughter of a wise mother. These two daughters, however, have for a long time governed this world with uncontrollable sway.
In those dark and barbarous times amongst us, when there were hardly two feudal lords who had a New Testament in their houses, it might be pardonable to present the common people with fables; I mean those feudal lords, their ignorant wives, and brutish vassals. They were then made to believe that St. Christopher carried the child Jesus on his shoulders from one side of the river to the other; they were entertained with stories of witches and witchcraft; they readily believed that St. Genou cured the gout, and St. Claire sore eyes. The children believed in hobgoblins, and their fathers in St. Francis’ girdle; and relics swarmed out of number.
The common people have continued to be infected with the rust of these superstitions, even after religion became more enlightened. It is well known that when M. de Noailles, bishop of Châlons, ordered the pretended relic of the holy navel to be taken away and thrown into the fire, the whole city of Châlons joined in a prosecution against him; but he, who had resolution equal to his piety, soon brought the people of his diocese to believe that one may adore Jesus Christ in spirit and in truth, without having his navel in a church.
Those whom we call Jansenists were not a little instrumental in rooting out by degrees, from the minds of the greatest part of the nation, the many absurd notions which were the disgrace of our holy religion. And it no longer continued to be thought sufficient to repeat the prayer of thirty days to the Blessed Virgin, to obtain whatever one should ask, and sin with impunity.
At length the lower kind of people began to imagine that it was not St. Geneviève who gave rain or caused it to cease, but God Himself, who disposed the elements according to His good will and pleasure. The monks have been astonished to find their saints no longer perform miracles; and if the writers of the life of St. Francis Xavier were to come again into the world they would not venture to assert that their saint raised nine people from the dead; that he was at one and the same time both on the sea and on shore; or that a crab brought him his crucifix, which he had dropped out of his hand into the water.
It has happened much the same with regard to excommunications. Our French historians tell us that when King Robert was excommunicated by Pope Gregory V. for having married the Princess Bertha, who was his godmother, his domestics threw all the victuals that came from his table out of the windows, and that his queen Bertha was delivered of a goose as a punishment for this incestuous alliance. It is not likely that the pages of the presence to a king of France nowadays would throw his dinner into the streets if he should be excommunicated, nor would it be very readily believed that the queen was brought to bed of a bird.
If there are some few convulsionists yet to be met with in an obscure corner of the town it is a kind of lousy disease that infects only the dregs of the people. Reason is every day making her way into the tradesman’s counting house, as well as into the palaces of our nobility. It behooves us then to cultivate the fruits of this reason, more especially as it is impossible to prevent them from sprouting forth. France, after having been enlightened by a Pascal, a Nicole, an Arnaud, a Bossuet, a Descartes, a Gassendi, a Bayle, a Fontenelle, and other bright geniuses like them, is no longer to be governed as in the times of Garasse and Menot.
If the masters of error, I mean the great masters who were so long a time prayed to and reverenced for brutalizing the human species, were at present to enjoin us to believe that the seed must rot in the earth before it can sprout; that this earth continues immovable on its basis without revolving about the sun; that the tides are not the natural effect of gravitation; that the rainbow is not formed by the refraction and reflection of the rays of light, etc., and were they to bring certain passages of Scripture badly understood and worse interpreted to authenticate their ordinances, how would they be looked upon by every person of common capacity? Would fools be thought too harsh a name to be imposed on them? But if they should have recourse to compulsion and persecution to establish their insolent ignorance, would not madmen and butchers be deemed a proper appellation?