The aim of this work, with some observations on the excellences of the Christian faith
1. The maxim adopted in our day by certain modern writers is this: that the truths of faith are indeed to be venerated, but that the light of natural reason—with which man is endowed to distinguish truth from falsehood—is not therefore to be despised. From this they have taken for themselves the freedom of thought; and from freedom of thought they have gone further, claiming also the freedom of doubting those truths of faith that seem to them not in accord with reason. And so in these latter times a multitude of pestilent books has appeared, filled with impiety, each differing from the others. They circulate in the French tongue under various specious titles, such as: On Manners, On the Mind, The Examination of Religion, The Religion of Ladies, A Treatise on Human Reason, Philosophical Thoughts, Telliamed, Émile, The Virtue of the Pagans, The Philosophy of Good Sense, The Spirit of the Laws, The Continuation of the Defense of the Spirit of the Laws, Letters on the Essential Religion of Man, Jewish Letters, The Princesses of Malabar, Philosophical Celibacy, The Analysis of Bayle, The Encyclopedic Dictionary, The Works Written in Its Defense, The Social Contract, The Philosophical Dictionary, The Letters of Montaigne, An Epistle on General History, The Philosophy of History, Oriental Despotism—and many others under the names of novels, satires, romances, and plays. Of these authors, one says that religion was born of reason of state; another, of the fear of punishment; one denies the existence of God and says that all is matter; another admits a God but denies revealed religion; another denies divine providence, saying that God takes no care of his creatures; another says that the soul of man is equal to that of the beasts, and therefore acts of necessity, without freedom; another says that the soul dies with the body; another, that it does not die, but that there is no punishment for it in the other life; another, that there is punishment, but that it is always temporal and never eternal; another, that in living we ought to follow no rule except the one that our own interest or pleasure dictates—as Helvétius says in his infamous little book entitled On the Mind, which is passed from one reader to another. Therefore, toward the end of the third part of this work, we shall briefly set forth its chief and most pernicious maxims, in order to refute them. Such writers are deceitful and cunning. At times they affirm as certain and beyond doubt things that are most certainly false. Moreover, they make a show of venerating holy things—the books of Moses, the Gospel, and religion itself—and then, from time to time, scatter abroad the poisoned spittle of their errors, the better to deceive readers who are ignorant or unwary.
2. The authors of these impious books are Hobbes, Spinoza, Collins, Toland, d’Argens, Voltaire, Tindal, Montaigne, Woolston, Saint-Évremond, Shaftesbury, Locke, and many others. Le Moine, moreover, reports a pastoral letter of the so-called bishop of London, in which he laments the great number of books newly published in England steeped in materialism or deism, besides others printed in Holland and elsewhere. These authors are also at variance among themselves; but all make war upon religion, some openly and others indirectly, mixing together texts of Scripture, passages from pagan authors, and a thousand points of erudition and brief facts, but in confusion, without citations, without order, and without fidelity. The impious Pierre Bayle is the one who lends support to all these execrable writers; for he gathers together all their impieties, now defending them and now attacking them, so that his aim is nothing other than to cast everything into doubt—the errors of unbelievers no less than the truths of the faith—in order at last to conclude that there is nothing certain to be believed and no religion that we are bound to embrace.
3. Pierre Bayle, of the so-called Reformed religion, was born at Carlat, a little town in the county of Foix, on the 18th of November 1647, son of Guillaume Bayle, a minister of that country. At the age of 22, at the prompting of the curate of Puylaurens, where he was studying, he became a Catholic; but he remained a Catholic for no more than 17 months, and returned to Protestantism. Thereupon he withdrew to Geneva, on account of the king’s edict, which did not permit those who had relapsed into heresy to remain in France. Nevertheless, he went to Paris, and afterward obtained the chair of philosophy at Sedan; but he stayed there only a little while, because that academy was suppressed by the king, which forced him to take refuge in Holland, where, at Rotterdam, he lectured on philosophy and history, with a pension of 500 florins. But having published there the book Advice to the Refugees, he was stripped of his post at the instigation of Monsieur Jurieu, who attacked the book as contrary to religion. Bayle was learned; but he himself confesses that in his writings he furnishes the learned with nothing but very crude and undigested combinations. And would to God he had never written at all, since his books have wrought much harm among Christians! He died in the year 1706, on the 28th of December, at the age of 59 years. He wrote many works, which there is no need to mention here. He defended his so-called Reformed religion in his Conversations of Maximus and Themistius, which did not appear until 1707, after his death. But his most harmful and pestilent work was the Historical and Critical Dictionary, whose first edition appeared in 1696. There, in treating the origin of evil, he greatly favored the arguments of the Manicheans. But the system he most favored, and which is scattered throughout the whole work, was Pyrrhonism.
4. Pyrrhonism, which consists in casting all truths into doubt, is the most pernicious system of all, because it admits no principle, however certain and evident it may be. Thus there is no way to convince the followers of this most foolish and brutish system; for, since they doubt every certain principle, there are no longer any reasons with which to persuade them. But what manner of reasonable men are these, upon whom no reason avails? The Pyrrhonists say—and especially Mr. Bayle, with whom La Mothe le Vayer and Montaigne keep company—that Pyrrhonism is the fittest way to bring intellects captive to the obedience of religion. Oh, what a fair face of piety! There is no doubt that in the dogmas taught by religion, which are above our understanding, we must bring the intellect captive, as St. Paul says, in homage to faith. But we must examine the arguments of credibility, in order to know which among all religions is the true one; and God himself wills that in this we use natural reason, so that, discerning the true religion, we may then be led, with the help of grace, to believe all that she teaches, although we do not comprehend the mysteries she proposes. Otherwise, if we should wish to embrace blindly whatever religion presents itself before us, without first ascertaining which is the true one, we might follow any religion we pleased—the Jewish, the Mohammedan, and even the idolatrous. But how shall a man know the true religion when his system is to cast into doubt all certain principles and all truths? Such a one will either be an atheist, believing none, or will embrace at random whichever religion pleases him, though it be false and impious. Bayle adds that in such doubts we should await from God knowledge of what we must believe. But how shall he believe in God who doubts even whether there be a God, rejecting all the arguments that demonstrate his existence?
5. Mr. Dorell, an Englishman but a good Catholic, complains that in former times unbelievers went about unrecognized, that they might not be treated as impious and as fools; and if they were infected with errors against the faith, at least they did not dare to appear so; but the modern unbelievers declare themselves openly, and boast of judging freely concerning the Divinity and religion, to gain the name of strong spirits (the esprits forts, the freethinkers), free from prejudice. By this they claim to abolish every law and every rule of life. For once belief in a God who rewards good and punishes evil is taken away, and the laws of religion are abolished, man becomes like the beasts—indeed, worse than they: the senses rule over reason, pleasure decides what is right, self-interest what is just, and revenge what is honorable; in a word, every vice is made praiseworthy, provided it bears the appearance of the useful or the pleasant. Let us hear also what Edmund Gibson, bishop of London, wrote in a pastoral letter against the books of the modern unbelievers (I give here only some of his sentiments): “What snares are not laid for innocence! What blasphemies against God! It seems that this great city is the marketplace of irreligion, where the art of corrupting morals is bought for gold. Between impiety and laxity there is too close a kinship. Experience shows us that those who live without fear of the future abandon themselves to the most wicked passions; and that he who has no regard for God will have none for men either. They have come even to brutality. Not content with corrupting themselves, they seek the corruption of others. They have not blushed to set before the eyes of the people the public baths, with the most lewd and filthy pictures. What more dismal example of the deplorable state in which we find ourselves!”
6. Behold the great harm brought by the iniquitous liberty of thinking, which, according to the modern manner of philosophizing, reigns in the present age, and is the cause of the ruin of many poor young men, who, driven by the curiosity to learn new things, read such books; but then, not knowing how to free themselves from some sophism they meet in their reading, begin to waver in the faith, and thereafter, abandoning themselves to vice, come to be the more blinded. But what audacity and impiety is this, to set doubts born of our weak minds against the truths revealed by an infallible God, who is the truth by essence? And to make reason do battle with faith? The Lord wills indeed that we use our reasoning; but not in order to comprehend the reason of all that he has revealed to us—only to believe with certainty that it is he who has spoken. Once we have made sure, then, that the things proposed to us to be believed have been said by God, we must submit our reason to faith, believing on the divine word all those things that faith proposes to us, although we do not comprehend them—not because they are opposed to reason, but because they are above our reason.
7. That we may not err, therefore, we must distinguish the truth of the faith from the things of the faith. The truth of the faith is manifest to our natural reason, but not so the things of the faith. For this reason it is called a light amid the darkness; for it is at once obscure and clear. It is obscure, because it teaches us things that we do not see and do not comprehend; and so the Apostle calls faith “the evidence of things that appear not” (Heb. 11:1). This befitted both the divine honor and our good. It befitted the divine honor that man should subject to God not only his will, by obeying his precepts, but also his intellect, by believing his words. What honor would man give to God, if he believed only the things he sees and comprehends? But he honors him well by believing what he neither sees nor comprehends, and believing all for no other reason than that God has said it. And this motive, moreover, makes the certainty of the objects of faith—although in the present life they are hidden from us—surpass the certainty of all the things we see with our eyes, and of all the truths we know with our minds; inasmuch as the truths we know we apprehend only by means of the senses, which often deceive us, or by means of our intellects, by which we often deceive ourselves; but the truths of faith are made manifest to us by God, who can neither be deceived nor deceive.
8. It befitted our good, too, that the things of the faith should be obscure to us; because if they were evident, we should believe them not by choice but by necessity; so that in giving our assent we should have no merit, which consists in believing, not of necessity, but voluntarily, things we do not comprehend. “Faith loses its merit,” wrote St. Gregory, “when human reason furnishes it proof”: Fides amittit meritum, cum humana ratio praebet experimentum. And therefore our Savior said: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed” (John 20:29).
9. Our faith, on the other hand, is clear, because the marks of its credibility are so evident that, as the great Pico della Mirandola said, it is not only imprudence, but madness, to refuse to embrace it: madness and impiety, since in order not to believe one must resist the very lights of nature. “Thy testimonies,” sang David, “are become exceedingly credible” (Ps. 92:5). And here we must admire divine providence, which has ordained that on the one hand the truths of faith be hidden from us, that we may have merit in believing them; and on the other hand that the motives for believing it to be the one true faith be evident, so that the unbelievers may have no excuse if they will not follow it: “He that believeth not shall be condemned” (Mark 16:16). And so Hugh of St. Victor said: “Justly is the reward given to the faithful for their faith, and to the unfaithful the punishment for their unbelief.” Human reason, then, is that which—says a learned author—takes man as it were by the hand, and leads him into the sanctuary of faith; and, stopping at the threshold, delivers him over to the school of religion. It speaks no more, but only says to him: Hear now the lessons of a teacher more excellent than I; from this point forward listen to her alone, and seek counsel of me no more, resting in all that she tells you. So reason examines, before believing, whom it ought to believe; but once it has made sure of the master whom it ought to believe, it believes, and examines no further. Reason disputes nothing but the proofs of the truthfulness of the one who reveals, and of the truth of the revelation; but, the proofs once verified, it disputes the revealed things no longer, but itself exhorts us to believe him who has revealed them.
10. But the point is that the infidelity of the mind is for the most part a punishment for the infidelity of a heart depraved by vice, and especially by pride or by impurity. To put the rules of religion into practice, it is not enough to be persuaded that it is true; one must moreover love it. It is love united with faith that makes a man act. St. Augustine said: “Nothing makes manners good or bad but good or bad loves”: Non faciunt bonos vel malos mores, nisi boni vel mali amores.
11. And here we must observe that man is slow to love an object that makes him unhappy. On the contrary, he willingly loves that on which his happiness depends, and for it readily renounces the love of everything else. The devil paints the Catholic religion as a tyrannical religion, which lays upon its followers toils and pains, and forbids them to satisfy any desire, obliging them always to contradict themselves. But here we must remove the deception. Religion is opposed, it is true, to desires for apparent and false goods, but not to desires for the true good; on the contrary, it does everything to content them. It commands us to love God alone, who alone can make us happy, and content the desires of our heart: “Delight in the Lord, and he will give thee the requests of thy heart” (Ps. 36:4). And so St. Augustine charmingly writes: “Purify your love; the water that flows into the sewer, turn toward the garden”—that is to say, take your affection from creatures, and give it to God, and so you shall be fully happy.
12. No, religion is no tyrant; it draws us out of the slavery of the senses and the passions, making us aware that we are nobler than those wretched goods that sense desires. Do you seek—it says to us—your happiness? Seek it, but seek it where it is found. Do you seek goods? Seek that one good which contains all goods. Do you wish to be blessed forever, or only for a few days? Do you wish a joy that may sate and content you for all eternity, or rather a base delight that vanishes as soon as it is had, and leaves your heart full of gall? Do you wish the true honor that makes you esteemed before all the world, or a smoke of false honor from a few who outwardly praise you but inwardly despise you? You say it is no good counsel to leave a present good in order to gain a future one, and to avoid a future evil; but would you exchange a future kingdom for a present farthing? And would you accept fifty years of prison for an hour’s amusement?
13. Do you think, perhaps, that present goods can make you fully content? Ask the worldly whether they live content with the goods of this world. And then ask the lovers of God whether they live discontented in living detached from earthly goods. The former will tell you that they have not a moment of peace, and that they have never tasted true contentment. The latter will tell you that, having found God, they have nothing more to desire in this life; and that, if they suffer here, those very pains are dear to them, since by them they make themselves more pleasing to their beloved Lord, and worthy of greater joy in the eternal ages. The poor worldly live always with a thousand fears of the many misfortunes that may befall them here below. He who loves God fears nothing; no misfortune does he fear but that of sinning; his one fear is to displease God; but because he trusts in his goodness, he lives always in peace. “Come, then, with me,” says religion, “and I will lead you by a way harsh indeed to the eyes of flesh, but sweet and lovely to good souls; and I will not leave you until I see you entered into the joy of that God who is the fountain of all contentment.”
14. So religion commands us nothing but to be forever happy, and forbids us nothing but to make ourselves forever miserable: it commands us to win for ourselves an eternal blessedness, and forbids us to fall into an eternal torment. And in commanding us to love God with all our heart, it commands us to be happy in this life and in the other. God is our last end, and in him consists all our good; so that, in loving God, we love him who alone can make us content. He wills that we love nothing outside of him, letting us know that outside of him no object can content us. He wills all our heart, and this also because he desires us to be fully blessed. The more love we give to creatures, the more happiness we lose. So the precept of loving God with all the heart forms our full beatitude.
15. It is a deception, then, to believe that our inclinations are ourselves, so that to content our passions is the same as to procure our good. All is deception. Tell me: would it not be a deception if a sick man should choose that physician who allows him all that pleases the sense, but harms the health; or should refuse to have the abscess cut that is bringing him to death, to spare himself that brief pain? We must be persuaded that our appetites are not ourselves, but are our enemies. To content our senses is the same as to condemn ourselves to death by our own hand. Ah, experience too well shows that the goods of the world cannot content our heart; on the contrary, the more abundant they are, the more they leave it famished and afflicted! And this is, among others, an argument of our faith, that God is our last end: to see that man on this earth, however he may abound in riches, in pleasures, in honors, ever covets more, and never is content. It is a sign, then, that man is created for an infinite good, which fully contents not only the senses of the body, but also the powers of the soul; and this good can be none other than God, the last end for which man is created. Otherwise, if man were created for the earth, earthly goods would indeed content him, as they already content the brutes, which are made for this earth alone. On the contrary, let us ask St. Paul the hermit in his cave, St. Francis of Assisi on the mount of Alverno, St. Mary Magdalen de’ Pazzi in her convent, whether they desire anything of this world; and they will all answer us: Nothing, nothing; we wish only for God, and nothing more. But let us hear, too, a St. Augustine, who was once immersed in the pleasures of the world. What does he say when, afterward, detached from them, he gave himself to God? Here is what he confesses: “All things are hard, and you alone are rest”: Dura sunt omnia, et tu solus requies. My God, he says, outside of you everything is pain; you alone are the true peace, the true contentment.
16. Someone will say: I know well the truth that all peace lies in loving God; but what am I to do if I do not feel drawn to this holy love? In order to be drawn to it, I tell you it is necessary that you drive from your heart the affections of earth, otherwise the divine love cannot enter. And then you must pray, and seek this love from God himself: “Draw me after thee; we will run to the odor of thy ointments” (Cant. 1:3). God will surely hear him who asks him, with true desire and perseverance, for the grace to love him; and he will then recompense him abundantly, even on this earth, for all that he has left for him. St. Augustine said: “How sweet did it suddenly become to me to be without the sweetnesses of trifles! and what I had feared to lose, it was now a joy to let go. For you cast them out from me, you who are the true and highest sweetness; you cast them out, and entered in their place, sweeter than every pleasure.” Lastly David says: “Taste, and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps. 33:9). O God! why does anyone despise the holy life, united with God, if he has not yet tasted it? Let him taste it first, and then despise it; but if he comes to taste it, certainly he will despise it no more.
17. Let the digression we have made serve us to thank God for the gift he has given us of the true faith, and on the other hand to pity the madness of those strong spirits who, living immersed in the filth of vice, seek to free themselves from the remorse of conscience by endeavoring to remove from their mind the belief in a God who punishes the vicious. Let them flatter themselves as much as they will, that there is no God; let them do their utmost to live, as they say, freed from the eternal maxims; conscience will never cease to bark against them in their heart until death, when its remorse will be felt all the more strongly; and in life they will never find the true peace, which is the privilege only of the faithful, who believe and love God.
18. Lucretius blasphemes when he says that his Epicurus, by doing away with the existence of God, has swept the terrors from the minds of the wicked; for he speaks thus to his master:
Nam simul ac ratio tua coepit vociferari naturam rerum, haud divina mente coortam, diffugiunt animi terrores…
“For as soon as your philosophy begins to proclaim aloud that the nature of things was not framed by a divine mind, the terrors of the soul take flight.” But did Lucretius himself find this peace, when the unhappy man—as is reported in the notes to Racine’s poem—unable any longer to endure the torment of his conscience and the dread of the divine vengeance, killed himself voluntarily at the age of forty-four?
19. Lucretius, the Latin poet, was born into an ancient and famous Roman family. He is reported to have gone to study at Athens, where, so far as appears, he was a disciple of Zeno and of Phaedrus the Epicureans, and joined their sect. He was praised by Cicero and by Velleius for his learning and his eloquence. Ovid wrote of him (l. 1, de Arte amandi, Eleg. 15) thus: Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti, Exitio terras cum dabit una dies.—“The verses of sublime Lucretius shall perish only then, when one day shall give the earth to destruction.” He died at the age of 43 or 44, of a madness brought upon him by a love-philter given him by Lucilia his wife, who loved him beyond all measure. In the intervals of this infirmity he composed his pestilent books On the Nature of Things, and these alone of his works have remained to us. Several authors report that he killed himself; so write Vossius and Bayle, on the authority of Scaliger and Gassendi. To the death of Lucretius may be added the unhappy death of the famous and wicked Vanini, called by Bayle the illustrious martyr of atheism, who (as Gramont reports, lib. 3) was seized at Toulouse in France for his unbelief. Because he pretended to become a Catholic, his punishment was deferred; but when his pretense was discovered, he was condemned to death, to which the wretch went, wholly agitated by frenzy, and so died like one desperate and brutish. Behold what is the life and the death of those who boast that they believe neither in God nor in eternity.
20. Lucretius’s translator, Mr. Clerc, in England, hastened his own end likewise, for he hanged himself at the age of forty. Bayle himself writes (that faithful companion of Lucretius, who, assailing in his works all religions, the true—which is the Christian—as well as the false, labors to cast every matter of faith into doubt, that nothing more may be believed)—he writes, I say, that Caligula, Nero, and like monsters, in the midst of their wickednesses, sometimes howled from the terror they felt within themselves at the thought that there is an eternal judge who punishes the impious. The learned Father Valsecchi, in his celebrated work lately brought to light, entitled On the Foundations of Religion (from which, I confess, I have drawn many insights), relates that in the time of Henry the Great certain libertines said: “And will it not be possible, O priests, that you should grant us either that there is no sin in the world, and that God permits us to do whatever we please, or else that we may say there is no God? At least cease to trouble our repose before death, that repose which is the forgetting of this truth.” But a theologian answered the libertine who said this: “It is not our voice that disquiets you; it is the cries that go forth from all parts of the world, and proclaim to you that there is a God, who knows your thoughts and your actions.” So the basis of the unbelief of these impious men, who labor in the present times to put forth so many poisoned books, is the craving to be able to do all evil without remorse and without fear. “Grant these men,” says Father Valsecchi, “to be wicked with impunity, and at once they cease to write, and even to speak, against religion.”
21. But let us now give an account of the work. Here, besides, we do not intend to speak to those who need to examine the proofs of the faith in order to embrace it, but to him who already believes, that he may be consoled in his belief, and render thanks to the Lord who has made him worthy of it. The proofs, nevertheless, that will be brought here against materialism and deism (errors that reign today, and are more rife than the others, throughout not only heretical but also Catholic lands) are more than sufficient to convince every sectary that he goes astray, and stands outside the way of salvation. In the first part, then, the proofs of the existence of God will be brought against the materialists, refuting their false system of eternal matter. In the second part, the truth of our revealed religion will be proved against the deists. And in the third part, finally, it will be proved against all the unfaithful and heretics that our Catholic religion alone is the one true one. But because the atheists, who deny God, cannot be convinced by the truth of the divine revelation, unless it be first demonstrated to them that there is a God who reveals, therefore the first part will be wholly employed in demonstrating the existence of God.
22. I know well that on this matter many learned books, and even voluminous works of many tomes, have come forth; but I, from a desire to be useful to the public, have thought to gather from such works, as briefly as I could, the most useful information and the most convincing reasons to confound the fallacies set forth by these unbelievers, and have endeavored to compress everything within this book; so that those who either cannot afford to buy the larger works, or have not the time to read them, may here learn of the errors that are running through Europe today and, to our misfortune, are coming from the lands beyond the mountains to spread through our Italy as well; and may find alongside them the answers to the sophisms of the misbelievers.