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144 psychosis (transmigration of souls); but who would look for reasoning among the Jews? Their powers in that direction are confined to money matters. The Sadducees and Samaritans rejected the immortality of the soul, because it is not found anywhere in the Mosaic law.

This was the great spring which the early Christians, all half-Jewish, relied upon to put the new machinery in action: community of goods, secret meals, hidden mysteries, gospels read to the initiated only, paradise for the poor, hell for the rich, and exorcisms by charlatans. Here, in strict truth, we have the first foundations of the Christian sect. If I deceive you—or, rather, if I deliberately deceive you—I pray the God of the universe, the God of all men, to wither the hand that writes this, to shatter with his lightning a head that is convinced of the existence of a good and just God, and to tear out from me a heart that worships him.

Let us now, Romans, consider the artifices, roguery, and forgery to which the Christians themselves have given the name of "pious frauds"; frauds that have cost you your liberty and your goods, and have brought down the conquerors of Europe to a most lamentable slavery. I again take God to witness that I will say no word that is not amply proved. If I wished to use all the arms of reason against fanaticism, all the piercing darts of truth against error, I should speak to you first of that prodigious number of contradictory gospels