1. This study has made them lose sight of positive ideas and present interests. It has given them a taste for useless researches and metaphysical subtleties; in fact, in the north of Germany, which is the centre of Protestantism, there reigns in the opinions and in the writings of the most renowned philosophers and popular novelists, the wildest mysticism.
2. This study pollutes the imagination, by pictures of many base vices, which civilization has caused to disappear; such as all imaginable kinds of bestiality and incest.
3. This study fixes the attention upon political desires adverse to the public weal. It prompts the governed to establish in society an equality, which is absolutely impracticable. It prevents Protestants from seeking to establish a political system, in which general interests shall be directed by the most skilful in the sciences, in the fine arts, and in industrial combinations; which is the best social system that the human race can adopt, being the only one that would contribute directly and efficiently to the amelioration of the moral and physical condition of the poor.
4. This study induces those who apply themselves to it to consider it as the most important of all studies; hence has originated the formation of Bible Societies, which distribute every year among the public, millions of copies of the Bible. Instead of employing their force in promoting the production and propagation of a doctrine proportioned to the state of civilization, these pretended Christian societies give to the philanthropic sentiments a direction which is both false and opposed to the public weal. Thinking to further the progress of the human mind, these societies would check it, if it were possible.
From these four great facts I conclude that my third accusation of heresy against the Protestants, on account of their dogma, is well founded.
I have been obliged to criticise Protestantism with the greatest severity, to make Protestants consider how incomplete has been the reformation of Luther,
