creatures! Can a reasonable being, who cares for the happiness of
another, strew the place assigned to him to dwell in with snares and
traps, or implant in his breast a hundred impulses of which the
gratification only drags him into an abyss? Is that Being my friend, who
suffers me to be born and to grow up, and leaves me tied to the martyr's
stake, with very few real joys, and finally kills me, innocent or guilty,
as surely as I am born? If the divinity which is supposed to bestow on
us a portion of the divine essence in the form of reason were constituted
as the crowd are taught to believe, there could be nothing on earth but
wisdom and goodness; but the majority are fools or wicked, and the good
are like tall trees, which the lightning blasts rather than the creeping
weed. Titianus falls before the dancer Theocritus, the noble Papinian
before the murderer Caracalla, our splendid Alexander before such a
wretch as Zminis; and divine reason lets it all happen, and allows human
reason to proclaim the law. Happiness is for fools and knaves; for those
who cherish and uphold reason--ay, reason, which is a part of the
divinity--persecution, misery, and despair."

"Have done!" Melissa exclaimed. "Have the judgments of the immortals not
fallen hardly enough on us? Would you provoke them to discharge their
fury in some more dreadful manner?"

At this the skeptic struck his breast with defiant pride, exclaiming:
"I do not fear them, and dare to proclaim openly the conclusions of my
thoughts. There are no gods! There is no rational guidance of the
universe. It has arisen self-evolved, by chance; and if a god created
it, he laid down eternal laws and has left them to govern its course
without mercy or grace, and without troubling himself about the puling of
men who creep about on the face of the earth like the ants on that of a
pumpkin. And well for us that it should be so! Better a thousand times