From Volney's The Ruins 166-67

["]Your gospels in their precepts and their parables, never represent God but as a despot without any rules of equity; a partial father treating a debauched and prodigal son with more favour than his respectful and virtuous children; a capricious master, who gives the same wages to workmen who had wrought but one hour, as to those who had laboured through the whole day; one who prefers the last comers to the first. The moral is everywhere misanthropic and antisocial; it disgusts men with life and with society; and tends only to encourage hermitism and celibacy.

"As to the manner in which you have practiced these morals, we appeal in our turn to the testimony of facts. We ask whether it is this evangelical meekness which has excited your interminable wars between your sects, your atrocious persecutions of pretended heretics, your crusades against Arianism, Manicheisim, Protestantism, without speaking of your crusades against us, and of their sacrilegious associations, still subsisting, of men who take an oath to continue them? We ask whether it be gospel charity which has made you exterminate whole nations in America, to annihilate the empires of Mexico and Peru; which makes you continue to dispeople Africa and sell its inhabitants like cattle, notwithstanding your abolition of slavery; which makes you ravage India and usurp its dominions, and whether it be the same charity which, for three centuries past, has led you to harass the habitations of the people of three continents, of whom the most prudent, the Chinese and Japanese, were constrained to drive you off, that they might escape your chains and recover their internal peace?"