Bartholomew. Hobbes passed for an atheist; he led a tranquil and
innocent life. The fanatics of his time deluged England, Scotland and
Ireland with blood. Spinoza was not only atheist, but he taught atheism;
it was not he assuredly who took part in the judicial assassination of
Barneveldt; it was not he who tore the brothers De Witt in pieces, and
who ate them grilled.

The atheists are for the most part impudent and misguided scholars who
reason badly, and who not being able to understand the creation, the
origin of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis
of the eternity of things and of inevitability.

The ambitious, the sensual, have hardly time for reasoning, and for
embracing a bad system; they have other things to do than comparing
Lucretius with Socrates. That is how things go among us.

That was not how things went with the Roman senate which was almost
entirely composed of atheists in theory and in practice, that is to say,
who believed in neither a Providence nor a future life; this senate was
an assembly of philosophers, of sensualists and ambitious men, all very
dangerous, who ruined the republic. Epicureanism existed under the
emperors: the atheists of the senate had been rebels in the time of
Sylla and Cæsar: under Augustus and Tiberius they were atheist slaves.

I would not wish to have to deal with an atheist prince, who would find
it to his interest to have me ground to powder in a mortar: I should be
quite sure of being ground to powder. If I were a sovereign, I would not
wish to have to deal with atheist courtiers, whose interest it would be
to poison me: I should have to be taking antidotes every day. It is
therefore absolutely necessary for princes and for peoples, that the