It happens, I confess, that sinners are sometimes found, who push their madness and impiety even to that last moment: who expire in vomiting forth, with their impious souls, blasphemies against the God who is to judge them, and whom they refuse to acknowledge. For, O my God! thou art terrible in thy judgments, and sometimes permittest that the atheist die in his impiety. But such examples are rare; and you well know, my brethren, that an entire age scarcely furnishes one of these shocking spectacles. But view, in that last moment, all the others who vaunted their unbelief; see a sinner on the bed of death, who had hitherto appeared the firmest in impiety, and the most resolute in denying all belief; he even anticipates the proposal of having recourse to the church remedies: he lifts up his hands to heaven, and gives striking and sincere marks of a religion which was never effaced from the bottom of his heart: he no longer rejects, as childish bugbears, the threatenings and chastisements of a future life; what do I say? — this sinner, formerly so firm, so stately in his pretended unbelief, so much above the vulgar fears, then becomes weaker, more fearful, and more credulous, than the lowest of the people; his fears are more excessive, his very religion more superstitious, his practices of worship more silly, and more extravagant than those of the vulgar; and, as one excess borders on its opposite excess, he is seen to pass in a moment from impiety to superstition; from the firmness of the philosopher to all the weakness of the ignorant and simple.
And here it is, that, with Tertullian, I would appeal to this dying sinner, and let him hold forth, in my stead, against unbelief; it is here that, to the honour of the religion of our fathers, I would wish no other testimony of the weakness and of the insincerity of the pretended atheist, than this expiring soul, who, surely, now can speak only the language of truth; it is here that I would assemble all unbelievers around his bed of death; and, to overthrow them by a testimony which could not be suspicious, would say to him, with Tertullian, " O soul! before thou quittest this earthly body, which thou art so soon to be freed from, suffer me to call upon thy testimony: speak, in this last moment, when vanity is no more, and thou owest all to the truth: say, if thou considerest the terrible God, into whose hands thou goest, as a chimerical being with whom weak and credulous minds are alarmed? Say, if all now disappearing from thine eyes, if, for thee, all creatures returning to nothing, God alone doth not appear to thee immortal, unchangeable, the being of all ages and of eternity, and who filleth the heavens and the earth? We now consent, we, whom thou hast always considered as superstitious and vulgar minds, we consent that thou judge between us and unbelief, to which thou hast ever been so partial. Though, with regard to faith, thou hast hitherto been as a stranger and the enemy of religion, religion refers its cause to thee, against those with whom the shocking tie of impiety had so closely united thee. If all die with thee, why does death appear so dreadful? Why these uplifted hands to heaven, if there
