Hence your antipathy to the church, to every institution
which is intended for the communication of religion, is always more
prominent than that which you feel to religion itself; hence, also,
priests, as the pillars and the most efficient members of such
institutions, are, of all men, the objects of your greatest
abomination.
Even those among you who hold a little more indulgent opinion with
regard to religion, and deem it rather a singularity than a disorder
of the mind, an insignificant rather than a dangerous phenomenon,
cherish quite as unfavorable impressions of all social organization
for its promotion. A slavish immolation of all that is free and
peculiar, a system of lifeless mechanism and barren ceremonies--these,
they imagine, are the inseparable consequences of every such
institution and are the ingenious and elaborate work of men, who, with
almost incredible success, have made a great merit of things which are
either nothing in themselves, or which any other person was quite as
capable of accomplishing as they. I should pour out my heart but very
imperfectly before you, on a subject to which I attach the utmost
importance, if I did not undertake to give you the correct point
of view with regard to it. I need not here repeat how many of the
perverted endeavors and melancholy fortunes of humanity you charge
upon religious associations; this is clear as light, in a thousand
utterances of your predominant individuals; nor will I stop to refute
these accusations, one by one, in order to fix the evil upon other
causes.
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