Jehovah on Its Side

The tenacity of prejudice and irritability of temper, are not

difficult to be accounted for. Every fanatic sect of religion speaks

in the name of heaven. It has enlisted Jehovah on its side, it keeps

up a familiar intercourse with celestial powers, and discerns, in all

the operations of those powers, the most decided partiality in favour

of the particular doctrines which its members have embraced. With

weak and fanatic minds, the confidence is prodigious which results

from a supposed alliance with heaven. A being armed in the name of a

ferocious God, slaughters with relentless cruelty every other being

who does not pay homage to the barbarous divinity, which his own

heated imagination has depicted. No prejudices are so deep rooted,

none so violent, as those of a religious nature, and their pernicious

effects are generally in proportion to the ignorance of the human

mind, and the barbarous condition of society. It is the light of

science alone that can destroy such causes of human wretchedness;

science opposes its own strength to the injurious effects of error

and prejudice, and in proportion as the former shall increase, the

latter will decrease; so that the hopes of the human race rest upon

the diffusion of knowledge, and the general cultivation of science.

Ignorance is a soil in which the rankest prejudices appear the most

flourishing, and promise the greatest portion of misery to mankind.

It is ignorance and interest united, which preserve the prejudices in

favour of those systems of religion so injurious to the operation of

intellectual power, and so destructive to the general felicity of man.