ABSTRACT
The priesthood have ever been convenient tools in the bands of tyrants, to keep the bulk of the people in a degraded servility. The republic of letters has never produced an author whose pen was so well calculated to emancipate mankind from all those trammels with which the nurse, the schoolmaster and the priest hare successively locked up their noblest faculties, before they were capable of reasoning and judging for themselves. The profound metaphysical knowledge displayed throughout the System of Nature, and the doctrines which are therein advanced, warrants the conclusion, that it is at once the most decisive, boldest, and most extraordinary work, that the human understanding ever had the courage to produce. Atheism is stigmatized with having "opened a wide door for libertinism, destroying the social and moral compact; and striking a deadly blow at religion.
