twelve poor men, without learning, talents, or support, hath subjected emperors, the learned equally as the illiterate, cities and empires; mysteries, apparently so absurd, have overthrown all the sects, and all the monuments of a proud reason, and the folly of the cross hath been wiser than all the wisdom of the age. The whole universe hath conspired against it, and every effort of its enemies hath only added fresh confirmation to it. To be a believer, and to be destined to death, were two things inseparable; yet the danger was only an additional charm; the more the persecutions were violent, the more progress did faith make; and the blood of the martyrs was the seed of believers. O God! who doth not feel thy finger here? Who, in these traits, would not acknowledge the character of thy work? Where is the reason which doth not feel the vanity of its doubts to sink into nothing here, and which still blushes to submit to a doctrine to which the whole universe hath yielded? But not only is this submission reasonable, it is likewise glorious to men?
Part II. — Pride is the secret source of unbelief. In that ostentation of reason, which induces the unbeliever to contemn the common belief, there is a deplorable singularity which natters him, and occasions him to suppose in himself more vigour of mind and more light than in the rest of men, because he boldly ventures to cast off a yoke to which they have all submitted, and to stand up against what all the rest had hitherto been contented to worship.
Now, in order to deprive the unbeliver of so wretched a consolation, it is only necessary to demonstrate, in the first place, that nothing is more glorious to reason than faith; glorious on the side of its promises for the future; glorious from the situation in which it places the believer for the present: lastly, glorious from the grand models which it holds out to his imitation.
Glorious on the side of the promises contained in it. What are the promises of faith, my brethren? The adoption of God, an immortal society with him, the complete redemption of our bodies, the eternal felicity of our souls, freedom from the passions, our hearts fixed by the possession of the true riches, our minds penetrated with the ineffable light of the sovereign reason, and happy in the clear and always durable view of the truth. Such are the promises of faith; it informs us that our origin is divine, and our hopes eternal.
Now, I ask, is it disgraceful to reason to believe truths which do such honour to the immortality of its nature? What, my brethren, would it then be more glorious to man to believe himself of the same nature as the beasts, and to look forward to the same end? What, the unbeliever would think himself more honoured by the conviction that he is only a vile clay, put together by chance, and which chance shall dissolve, without end, destination, hope, or any other use of his reason and of his body, than that of brutally plunging himself, like the brutes, into carnal gratifications! What! he would have a higher opinion of himself, when viewed in the light
