And they did well to strike at the power of the priest. For centuries the human mind has been fettered by the priestly chain. The priest claimed the whole life. Scarcely had a child entered the world when he lost his freedom in the rite of baptism; his will was made captive by the representative of theology; he was educated in the way of credulity, so that when he came to the age of Reason (or what should have been Reason) he submissively accepted the priest’s dogmas as being of divine origin and supernaturally revealed. Ninety-nine men out of every hundred have been satisfied to accept the word of the priest for the truth of these dogmas, to yield their souls up as slaves to clericalism, and swear allegiance to the illegitimate authority of “The Church.”
https://infidels.org/library/historical/m_d_aletheia/rationalists_manual.html#I