write against the Christian religion. The curate Meslier has gone
further yet than Woolston; he dares to treat the transport of our
Saviour by the devil upon the mountain, the wedding of Cana, the bread
and the fishes, as absurd fables, injurious to divinity, which were
ignored during three hundred years by the whole Roman Empire, and
finally passed from the lower class to the palace of the emperors, when
policy obliged them to adopt the follies of the people in order the more
easily to subjugate them. The denunciations of the English priest do not
approach those of the Champagne priest. Woolston is sometimes indulgent,
Meslier never. He was a man profoundly embittered by the crimes he
witnessed, for which he holds the Christian religion responsible. There
is no miracle which to him is not an object of contempt and horror; no
prophecy that he does not compare to those of Nostredamus. He wrote thus
against Jesus Christ when in the arms of death, at a time when the most
dissimulating dare not lie, and when the most intrepid tremble. Struck
with the difficulties which he found in Scripture, he inveighed against
it more bitterly than the Acosta and all the Jews, more than the famous
Porphyre, Celse, Iamblique, Julian, Libanius, and all the partisans of
human reason.

There were found among the books of the curate Meslier a printed
manuscript of the Treatise of Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray, upon the
existence of God and His attributes, and the reflections of the Jesuit
Tournemine upon Atheism, to which treatise he added marginal notes
signed by his hand.


DECREE

of the NATIONAL CONVENTION upon the proposition to erect a statue to the