THE SPUEIOUS VIRTUES OF THEOLOGY. 533 



The current religion is indirectly adverse to morals, 

 because it is adverse to the freedom of the intellect. 

 But it is also directly adverse to morals by inventing 

 spurious and bastard virtues. One fact must be 

 familiar to all those who have any experience of 

 human nature. A sincerely religious man is often 

 an exceedingly bad man. Piety and vice frequently 

 live together in the same dwelling, occupying different 

 chambers, but remaining always on the most amicable 

 terms. Nor is there anything remarkable in this. 

 Religion is merely loyalty: it is just as irrational to 

 expect a man to be virtuous because he goes to church, 

 as it would be to expect him to be virtuous because 

 he went to court. His king, it is true, forbids immo- 

 rality and fraud. But the chief virtues required are 

 of the lickspittle denomination — what is called a 

 humble and a contrite heart. When a Christian sins 

 as a man, he makes compensation as a courtier. When 

 he has injured a fellow-creature, he goes to church 

 with more regularity, he offers up more prayers, he 

 reads a great number of chapters in the Bible, and so 

 he believes that he has cleared off the sins that are 

 laid to his account. This, then, is the immorality of 

 religion as it now exists. It creates artificial virtues 

 and sets them off against actual vices. Children are 

 taught to do this and that, not because it is good, but 

 to please the king. When Christians are informed 

 that not only our physical but our moral actions are 

 governed by unchangeable law, and that the evil 

 treatment of the mind, like the evil treatment of the 

 body, is punished by a loss of happiness and health, 

 they cry out against a doctrine which is so just and so 

 severe. They are like the young Roman nobles who 

 complained when the Tarquins were expelled, saying, 



