be for impostors to find dupes, and I realized, even better than the
Roman orator, why two augurs could never look at each other without
laughing; it was because they had both an equal interest in giving
importance to the deceit they perpetrated, and from which they derived
such immense profits. But what I could not, and probably never shall,
understand, was the reason for which the Fathers, who were not so simple
or so ignorant as our Evangelists, did not feel able to deny the divinity
of oracles, and, in order to get out of the difficulty, ascribed them to
the devil. They never would have entertained such a strange idea if they
had been acquainted with cabalistic science. My three worthy friends were
like the holy Fathers; they had intelligence and wit, but they were
superstitious, and no philosophers. But, although believing fully in my
oracles, they were too kind-hearted to think them the work of the devil,
and it suited their natural goodness better to believe my answers
inspired by some heavenly spirit. They were not only good Christians and
faithful to the Church, but even real devotees and full of scruples. They
were not married, and, after having renounced all commerce with women,
they had become the enemies of the female sex; perhaps a strong proof of
the weakness of their minds. They imagined that chastity was the
condition 'sine qua non' exacted by the spirits from those who wished to
have intimate communication or intercourse with them: they fancied that
spirits excluded women, and 'vice versa'.

With all these oddities, the three friends were truly intelligent and
even witty, and, at the beginning of my acquaintance with them, I could
not reconcile these antagonistic points. But a prejudiced mind cannot
reason well, and the faculty of reasoning is the most important of all.
I often laughed when I heard them talk on religious matters; they would
ridicule those whose intellectual faculties were so limited that they
could not understand the mysteries of religion. The incarnation of the