the eyes of God alone, and as if there were no longer men upon the earth — what dignity! Find, if you can, any thing greater in the universe. Review all the various kinds of glory with which the world gratifies the vanity of men; and see, if, all together, they can bestow that degree of dignity to which the godly are raised by faith.
Now, my dear hearer, what more honourable to man than this situation? Do you consider him as more glorious, more respectable, more grand, when he follows the impulses of a brutal instinct; when he is the slave of hatred, revenge, voluptuousness, ambition, envy, and all those other monsters which alternately reign in his heart?
For, are you, who make a boast of unbelief, thoroughly acquainted with what is an unbeliever? He is a man without morals, probity, faith, or character, who owns no rule but his passions, no law but his iniquitous thoughts, no master but his desires, no check but the dread of authority, no God but himself: an unnatural child, seeing he believes that chance alone hath given him fathers; a faithless friend, seeing he looks upon men, merely as the wretched fruits of a wild and fortuitous concurrence, to whom he is connected only by transitory ties; a cruel master, seeing he is convinced that the strongest and the most fortunate have always reason on their side. For, who could henceforth place any dependence upon you? You no longer fear a God; you no longer respect men; you look forward to nothing after this life; virtue and vice are merely prejudices of education in your eyes, and the consequences of popular credulity. Adulteries, revenge, blasphemies, the blackest treacheries, abominations which we dare not even to name, are no longer, in your opinion, but human prohibitions, and regulations established through the policy of legislators. According to you, the most horrible crimes, or the purest virtues, are all equally the same, since an eternal annihilation shall soon equalize the just and the impious, and for ever confound them both in the dreary mansion of the tomb. What a monster must you then be upon the earth! Does this representation of you highly gratify your pride, or can you support even its idea?
Besides, you pride yourself upon irreligion, as springing from your superiority of mind; but trace it to its source. What hath led you to free-thinking? Is it not the corruption of your heart? Would you have ever thought of impiety had you been able to ally religion with your pleasures? You began to hesitate upon a doctrine which incommoded your passions; and you have marked it down as false from the moment that you found it irksome. You have anxiously sought to persuade yourself what you had such an interest to believe; that all died with us; that eternal punishments were merely the terrors of education; that inclinations born with us could never be crimes; — what know I? And all those maxims of free-thinking originating from hell. We are easily persuaded of what we wish. Solomon worshipped the gods of foreign women only to quiet himself in his debaucheries. If men had never had
