will be useless. Manicheism is evidently the hinge of every religion;
but unhappily, the devil, invented to clear the deity from the
suspicion of malice, proves to us, every moment, the impotence
or unskilfulness of his celestial adversary.


76. The nature of man, it is said, was necessarily liable to corruption.
God could not communicate to him _impeccability_, which is an inalienable
attribute of his divine perfection. But if God could not make man
impeccable, why did he give himself the pains to make man, whose nature
must necessarily be corrupted, and who must consequently offend God?
On the other hand, if God himself could not make human nature impeccable,
by what right does he punish men for not being impeccable? It can
be only by the right of the strongest; but the right of the strongest
is called violence, and violence cannot be compatible with the justest
of beings. God would be supremely unjust, should he punish men for
not sharing with him his divine perfections, or for not being able
to be gods like him.

Could not God, at least, have communicated to all men that kind of
perfection, of which their nature is susceptible? If some men are
good, or render themselves agreeable to their God, why has not that
God done the same favour, or given the same dispositions to all beings
of our species? Why does the number of the wicked so much exceed
the number of the good? Why, for one friend, has God ten thousand
enemies, in a world, which it depended entirely upon him to people
with honest men? If it be true, that, in heaven, God designs to
form a court of saints, of elect, or of men who shall have lived
upon earth conformably to his views, would he not have had a more
numerous, brilliant, and honourable assembly, had he composed it of