Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 02.djvu/311

Rh fury of these tyrants, people threw themselves in crowds into cloisters, and so, to escape one servitude, put themselves into another; because the popes, by instituting so many different orders of sacred drones, contrived to have so many subjects to themselves in other states; because a peasant likes rather to be called reverend father, and to give his benedictions, than to follow a plough's tail; because he does not know that the plough is nobler than a monk's habit; because he had rather live at the expense of fools than by a laborious occupation; in short, because he does not know that, in making a monk of himself, he is preparing for himself unhappy days, of which the sad groundwork will be nothing but a tedium vitæ and repentance.

.—I am satisfied. Let us have no monks, for the sake of their own happiness, as well as ours. But I am sorry to hear it said by the landlord of our village, who is father to four boys and three girls, that he does not know how to dispose of his daughters, unless he makes nuns of them.

.—This too often repeated plea is at once inhuman, detrimental to the country, and destructive to society. Every time that it can be said of any condition of life whatever, that if all the world were to embrace it mankind would perish, it is proved that that condition is a worthless one, and that whoever embraces it does all the mischief to mankind that in him lies.

Now, it being a clear consequence that if all the