Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles de Secondat

The knife twist here is in the grammar: "a religion which he did not reveal to them". Montesquieu (writing as Charles de Secondat) turns theological certainty into a procedural question, as if divine justice were a matter of due process. The line isn’t piety; it’s a cross-examination. If revelation is the prerequisite for belief, then punishing the unreached becomes less a mystery than a moral absurdity.

The intent is strategic: undermine religious exclusivism without having to denounce religion outright. In an 18th-century France where blunt irreverence could cost you your career, your freedom, or your life, the safest way to attack dogma was to make it fail its own logic. The subtext is that a just God cannot be the celestial enforcer of geographic accident. If salvation depends on exposure to the correct creed, then God’s system rewards birthplace more than virtue - a scandalous idea dressed up as an innocent question.

Context matters because this is the Enlightenment’s favorite move: relocate authority from inherited institutions to reason and fairness. The question also needles missionary triumphalism and colonial arrogance; it implies that condemning people for ignorance you helped create is ethically grotesque. Beneath the politeness is a chilling accusation: religious systems that require God to punish the uninformed are confessing their own insecurity, outsourcing persuasion to fear.

It works because it’s disarming. You can’t easily prosecute a question for heresy, and you can’t easily answer it without revealing what kind of God you’re really defending.