How monstrous were the absurdities that the priesthood imposed on the ignorance and superstition of mankind in the Pagan world,concerning the originals of religions and governments,their institutions and rites,their laws and customs?What opportunities had they for such impositions,whilst the keeping the records and collecting the traditions was in so many nations the peculiar office of this order of men?A custom highly extolled by Josephus,but plainly liable to the grossest frauds,and even a temptation to them.If the foundations of Judaism and Christianity have been laid in truth,yet what numberless fables have been invented to raise,to embellish,and to support these structures,according to the interest and taste of the several architects?That the Jews have been guilty of this will be allowed:and,to the shame of Christians,if not of Christianity,the fathers of one church have no right to throw the first stone at the fathers of the other.Deliberate,systematical lying has been practised and encouraged from age to age;and among all the pious frauds that have been employed to maintain a reverence and zeal for their religion in the minds of men,this abuse of history has been one of the principal and most successful:an evident,an experimental proof,by the way,of what I have insisted upon so much,the aptitude and natural tendency of history to form our opinions,and to settle our habits.This righteous expedient was in so much use and repute in the Greek church,that one Metaphrastus wrote a treatise on the art of composing holy romances:the fact,if I remember right,is cited by Baillet,in his book of the lives of the saints.He and other learned men of the Roman church have thought it of service to their cause,since the resurrection of letters,to detect some impostures,and to depose,or to unniche,according to the French expression,now and then a reputed saint;but they seem in doing this to mean more than a sort of composition:they give up some fables that they may defend others with greater advantage,and they make truth serve as a stalking-horse to error.The same spirit that prevailed in the eastern church,prevailed in the western,and prevails still.A strong proof of it appeared lately in the country where I am.A sudden fury of devotion seized the people of Paris for a little priest,l undistinguished during his life,and dubbed a saint by the Jansenists after his death.Had the first minister been a Jansenist,the saint had been a saint still.All France had kept his festival:and since there are thousands of eye-witnesses ready to attest the truth of all the miracles supposed to have been wrought at his tomb,notwithstanding the discouragement which these zealots have met with from the government;we may assure ourselves,that these silly impostures would have been transmitted,in all the solemn pomp of history,from the knaves of this age to the fools of the next.
This lying spirit has gone forth from ecclesiastical to other historians:
and I might fill many pages with instances of extravagant fables that have been invented in several nations,to celebrate their antiquity,to ennoble their originals,and to make them appear illustrious in the arts of peace and the triumphs of war.When the brain is well heated,and devotion or vanity,the semblance of virtue or real vice,and,above all,disputes and contests,have inspired that complication of passions we term zeal,the effects are much the same,and history becomes very often a lying panegyric or a lying satire;for different nations or different parties in the same nation,belie one another without any respect for truth,as they murder one another without any regard to right or sense of humanity.Religious zeal may boast this horrid advantage over civil zeal,that the effects of it have been more sanguinary,and the malice more unrelenting.In another respect they are more alike,and keep a nearer proportion:different religions have not been quite so barbarous to one another as sects of the same religion;and,in like manner,nation has had better quarter from nation,than party from party.But in all these controversies,men have pushed their rage beyond their own and their adversaries'lives:they have endeavored to interest posterity in their quarrels,and by rendering history subservient to this wicked purpose,they have done their utmost to perpetuate scandal,and to immortalise their animosity.
The heathen taxed the Jews even with idolatry:the Jews joined with the heathen to render Christianity odious:but the church,who beat them at their own weapons during these contests,has had this further triumph over them,as well as over the several sects that have arisen within her own pale;the works of those who have written against her have been destroyed,and whatever she advanced,to justify herself and to defame her adversaries,is preserved in her annals,and the writings of her doctors.
