The fires of the Inquisition were burning when America was discovered, and the aborigines of the New World also sacrificed human beings to planetary gods. Almost every ceremonial in the Hebrew religion and likewise in every other religion goes back to these unusual events. I have a predecessor in Nicolas Boulanger, born in 1722, who lived only to the age of 37, a contemporary of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, and to me by far the greatest among them. He left six volumes and one theme is in all of them, actually what I am telling you. He was not a religious man, almost the opposite of it.
Terror survives from race to race. . .
The child will dread in perpetuity what frightened his ancestors. We shall there see the origin of the terrors which throughout the ages have alarmed the minds of men always possessed by ideas of the devastation of the world. There we shall see generated the destructive fanaticism, the enthusiasm which leads men to commit the greatest excesses against them-sieves and against their fellows, the spirit of persecution and intolerance which under the name of zeal makes man believe that he has the right to torment those who do not adore with him the same celestial monarch, or who do not have the same opinion he does about His essence or His cult. There is in our heritage fear and of hatred of man for man reaching from ancient times to our own days. He perhaps prepares his own annihilation because we are living in a time when man has technologically advanced so far that he is entering the Space Age, soon free to leave the limits of this ball of rock on which he travels.