mortal blows? His guilt has already been exaggerated by so many dark and malicious hearts, who have spread it in colours sufficient to blacken it for ever. Is he not sufficiently punished? He is now worthy of your pity rather than of your censures. What then could be your intentions? To condole with him for his misfortune? But to open afresh his wounds, is a strange way of condoling with an unfortunate brother. Is true compassion thus cruel? What is it then? To justify your prophecies and former suspicions on his conduct? To tell us, that you had always believed that, sooner or later, it would come to that? But you come, then, to triumph over his misfortune? To applaud yourself for his disgrace? To claim an honour to yourself for the malignity of your judgment? Alas! what glory can it be to a Christian to have suspected his. brother; to have believed him guilty before he was known as such; to have rashly foreseen his disgraces yet to come; — we, who ought not to see them, even when they have taken place. Ah! you can prophesy so justly on the destiny of others: be a prophet in your own country, and anticipate the misfortunes which threaten you. Why do you not prophesy thus for yourself, — that unless you fly from such an opportunity, and such a danger, you will perish in it? — that unless you dissolve such a connexion, the public which already murmurs, will at last break out, and then you will find it too late to repair the scandal; — that unless you quit these excesses, into which the passions of youth and a bad education have thrown you, your affairs and fortune will be ruined beyond resource? It is on these points that you ought to exercise your art of conjecture. What madness, while surrounded oneself with precipices, to be occupied in contemplating from afar those that threaten our brethren!
Besides, the more your brother's disgraces are public, the more affected ought you to be with the scandal which they necessarily occasion to the church; with the advantage which the wicked and the freethinkers will draw from them, to blaspheme the name of the Lord, to harden themselves in impiety and to persuade themselves that these are weaknesses common to all men, and that they are most virtuous who best know how to conceal them; — the more ought you to be afflicted at the occasion which these public examples of irregularity give to weak souls to fall into the same disorders; the more does charity oblige you to grieve over them; the more ought you to wish, that the remembrance of these faults should perish; that the day and the places of their revealment should be effaced from the memory of men; and, lastly, the more ought you, by your silence, to endeavour to suppress them. But the whole world speaks of them, you say: your silence will not prevent the public conversations; consequently, you make remarks in your turn. The inference is barbarous. Because you are unable to repair the disgrace, are you permitted to augment it? Because you cannot save your brother from shame, shall you assist to overwhelm him with confusion and infamy? Because almost every one casts a stone at him, shall it be less cruel in you to
