Governments are more interested than individuals in the destruction of errors that often lead to confusion, anarchy, and rebellion. If men had not become gradually enlightened, nations would now, as formerly, be under the yoke of the Roman pontiff, who could occasion revolution in their midst, overturn the laws, and subvert the government. But for the insensible progress of reason, states would now be filled with a tumultuous crowd of devotees, ready to revolt at the signal of an unquiet priest or a seditious monk.
You perceive, then, Madam, that men who think, and who teach others to think, are more useful to governments than those who wish to stifle reason and to proscribe forever the liberty of thought. You see that the true friends of a stable government are those who seek most sedulously to enlighten, educate, and elevate the people. You feel that by banishing knowledge and persecuting philosophy, government sacrifices its dearest interests to a seditious clergy, whose ambition and avarice push them to usurp boundless authority, and whose pride always makes them indignant at being in subjection to a power which they contend should be subordinate to themselves.
There is no priest who does not consider himself superior to the highest ruler of any country. We have often seen the priesthood avow pretensions of this character. The clergy are always enraged when an attempt is made to subject them to the secular power. Such an attempt they regard as profane, and they denounce it as tyranny whenever it is sought to be enforced. They pretend that in all times the priesthood has been sacred, that its rights come from God himself, and that no government can, without sacrilege, or without outraging the Divinity, touch the property, the privileges, or the immunities which have been snatched from ignorance and credulity. Whenever the civil authority would touch the objects considered inviolable and sacred in the hands of the priests, their clamors cannot be appeased; they make efforts to excite the people against the government; they denounce all authority as tyrannical when it has the temerity to think of subjecting them to the laws, of reforming their abuses, and neutralizing their power to injure. But they consider authority legitimate when it crushes _their_ enemies, though it appears insupportable as soon as it is reasonable and favorable to the people.