excesses. But, look around you: do you no longer find any upright characters on the earth? There is no question here of those vain discourses you so frequently hold against piety, and of which you feel yourselves the injustice. Speak candidly, and render glory to the truth: are there no longer chaste, faithful, and righteous souls, who live in the fear of the Lord, and in the observance of his holy law?
Whence comes it, then, that you have not the same empire over your passions as enjoyed by these just men? Have they not inherited from nature the same inclinations? Do the objects of the passions not awaken in their hearts the same sensations as in yours? Do not they bear within them the sources of the same troubles? What have the just superior to you, but that command over themselves, and fidelity, of which you are destitute?
O man! thou imputest to God a weakness which is the work of thine own disorders! Thou accusest the Author of nature of the irregularities of thy own will. It is not enough to offend him; thou wishest to make him responsible for thy deeds, and pretendest that the fruit of thy crimes becomes the title of thine innocence! With what chimeras is a corrupted heart not capable of feeding its delusions, in order to justify to itself the shame and infamy of its vices!
God is then just, my brethren, when he punisheth the transgressions of his law. And let not the freethinker here say to himself that the recompense of the just shall then be resurrection to eternal life, and the punishment of the sinner the everlasting annihilation of his soul; for behold the last resource of impiety.
But what punishment would it be to the freethinker to exist no more? He wishes that annihilation; he looks forward to it as his sweetest hope: amidst his pleasures he lives tranquil only in that expectation. What! the just God would punish a sinner by affording him a destiny according to the summit of his wishes? Ah! it is not thus that God punisheth. For what would the freethinker find so shocking in a return to nonentity? Would it be the deprivation of his God? But he loves him not; he knows him not; he desires no communication with him; for his only God is himself. Would it be to exist no more? But what could be more desirable to a monster, who knows that, beyond the term of his crimes, he cannot live but in sufferance, and in the expiation of the horrors of an infamous life? Would it be by having for ever lost the worldly pleasures he enjoyed, and the different objects of his passions? But, when he exists no more, the love of these must equally be extinguished. A more desirable fate cannot therefore be pointed out to a freethinker. It indeed would be the happy conclusion of all his excesses, horrors, and blasphemies.
No, my brethren! The hopes of the freethinker, but not his crimes, shall perish: his torments shall be as eternal as his debaucheries would have been, had he been master of his own destiny. He would willingly have eternized himself on the earth, in the
