of Him is immediately contradicted by the effects which they wish to attribute to Him.  Tell several artists to paint a chimera, each of them will form different ideas of it, and will paint it differently; you will find no resemblance in the features each of them will have given to a portrait whose model exists nowhere.  In painting God, do any of the theologians of the world represent Him otherwise than as a great chimera, upon whose features they never agree, each one arranging it according to his style, which has its origin but in his own brain?  There are no two individuals in the world who have or can have the same ideas of their God.

CXXIII.—­SKEPTICISM IN THE MATTER OF RELIGION, CAN BE THE EFFECT OF BUT A SUPERFICIAL EXAMINATION OF THEOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES.

Perhaps it would be more truthful to say, that all men are either skeptics or atheists, than to pretend that they are firmly convinced of the existence of a God.  How can we be assured of the existence of a being whom we never have been able to examine, of whom it is impossible to form any permanent idea, whose different effects upon ourselves prevent us from forming an invariable judgment, of whom no idea can be uniform in two different brains?  How can we claim to be completely persuaded of the existence of a being to whom we are constantly obliged to attribute a conduct opposed co the ideas which we had tried to form of it?  Is it possible firmly to believe what we can not conceive?  In believing thus, are we not adhering to the opinions of others without having one of our own?  The priests regulate the belief of the vulgar; but do not these priests themselves acknowledge that God is incomprehensible to them?  Let us conclude, then, that the conviction of the existence of a God is not as general as it is affirmed to be.

To be a skeptic, is to lack the motives necessary to establish a judgment.  In view of the proofs which seem to establish, and of the arguments which combat the existence of a God, some persons prefer to doubt and to suspend their judgment; but at the bottom, this uncertainty is the result of an insufficient examination.  Is it, then, possible to doubt evidence?  Sensible people deride, and with reason, an absolute pyrrhonism, and even consider it impossible.  A man who could doubt his own existence, or that of the sun, would appear very ridiculous, or would be suspected of reasoning in bad faith.  Is it less extravagant to have uncertainties about the non-existence of an evidently impossible being?  Is it more absurd to doubt of one’s own existence, than to hesitate upon the impossibility of a being whose qualities destroy each other?  Do we find more probabilities for believing in a spiritual being than for believing in the existence of a stick without two ends?  Is the notion of an infinitely good and powerful being who permits an infinity of evils, less absurd or less impossible than that of a square triangle?