SACRED MONSTROSITIES. 
291 
How they have abused my childhood, those educators of the 
people* They l elated to me that there was once a God of justice 
and clemency, (they called him Sabaoth ), who had commanded a 
father to slay his son as a pledge of his faith, and who had waited 
until the father’s knife was on his victim’s throat, to cry to the 
sacrificer to stop, seeing that it was only a joke. 
As though it were possible that a God, soever little human, 
could give way to such deplorable pleasantries, as though a God 
could stop the Sun, without stopping time and stopping himself. 
Ah 1 I know how many follies must be forgiven to human misery. 
I know it is admitted that the priest, who has his own passions to 
feed, must live by the altar, and that it is only wicked Gods who 
fill their purses, and who are consequently worth the trouble of ex- 
ploiting, but I have none the less right to say, that this doctrine, of 
the tempting God, is the most dishonorable folly which has yet found 
a place in the human brain, the gravest insult that intellect has 
cast upon the Deity. 
But what was the meaning of this monstrous doctrine of a God, 
supreme ordainer of worlds ; of a God who has His solar clusters 
and universes to conduct, and who amuses himself by tempting 
men in a very little corner of a very little planet, lost in the im- 
mensity of space ? It was the fatal and rigorous conclusion of 
the doctrine of the unworthiness of passion. It was necessary 
in fact to commence by insurrection against the law of God, the 
law of justice and of love, to establish the reign of oppression and 
of constraint. False morality must have excommunicated pas- 
sion befoi'e an English moralist could have dared to publish that 
sive in its revelations and manifestations on our globe. Wliat is there more 
incredible in the authenticity of sanguinary texts in the Bible, than in the 
existence of Megatheria — lions, wolves, or snakes among the works of cre- 
ation ? 
It is necessary that the passions of the individual should be crucified until 
the laws of Social Harmony are understood and institutionized, and that 
the allegiance due by each member of society and each passion of the soul 
to the collective unity, should be expressed in unqualified devotion. This, 
in the perversion to which false positions subject it, becomes asceticism 
and generates hypocrisy, but it is legitimate that the religious sentiment 
as well as every other should have special exponents, and there may be good 
and true priests as well as false ones (witness Oberlin). 
