whole exterior of piety a ridicule which falls upon religion itself. You perpetuate in the world, and support among men, those prejudices against virtue, and that universal illusion employed by Satan to deceive them, which is that of treating piety as perverse and a folly; you authorize the blasphemies of freethinkers and of the wicked; you accustom sinners to arrogate to themselves an ostentatious glory from vice and irregularity, and to consider debauchery as fashionable and genteel when contrasted with the ridicule of virtue. What, indeed, may I not say? Through your means piety becomes the fable of the world, the sport of the wicked, the shame of sinners, the scandal of the weak, and the rock even of the just; through you vice is held in honour, virtue is debased, truth is weakened, faith is extinguished, religion is annihilated, and corruption universally spreads; and, as foretold by the prophet, desolation perseveres even to the consummation and to the end.
Let me likewise add, that, through you, virtue becomes insupportable to itself: your derisions become a rock to the piety even of the just: you shake their faith; you discourage their zeal; you suspend their good desires; you stifle in their heart the liveliest impressions of grace; you stop them in a thousand deeds of fervour and virtue, which they dare not expose to the impiety of your censures; in spite of themselves, you force them to conform to your habits and maxims, which they detest; to abate from their retirement, their mortifications, and their prayers; and to consecrate to these duties only those concealed moments which may escape your knowledge and railleries. Through these means, you deprive the church of their edifying example; you deprive the weak of those succours which they would otherwise find there; sinners of that shame with which their presence would cover them; the just of that consolation which would animate them; and religion of a sight which would do it honour.
Alas! my brethren, in former ages tyrants never derided Christians, but in reproaching to them their pretended superstitions: they ridiculed the public honours which they saw them render to Jesus Christ, a person crucified, and the preference which was given to him by Christians over Jupiter and all the gods of the empire, whose worship was become respectable through the pomp and magnificence of their temples and altars, the antiquity of the laws, and the majesty of the Caesars: but, on the other hand, they bestowed loud and public praises on their manners; they admired their modesty, frugality, charity, patience, innocent and mortified life, and their absence from theatres, or every other place of public amusement; they could not, without veneration, regard the wise, retired, modest, humble, and benevolent manners of those simple and faithful believers. You, on the contrary, more senseless, find no fault with them for adoring Jesus Christ, and for placing their confidence and hope of salvation in the mystery of the cross; but you find it ridiculous that they should deny themselves every public pleasure; that they should live in the practice of retirement, mortification, and prayer; but you find them worthy of
