attack; they are men immersed in pleasure, and who would be very sorry to have a spare moment to devote to the investigation of wearisome truths which they are indifferent whether they know or not; men of a light and superficial character, and wholly unfitted for a moment's serious meditation or investigation; let me again repeat, men drowned in voluptuousness, and in whom even that portion of penetration and understanding, accorded by nature, hath been debased and extinguished by debauchery.
Such are the formidable supports of unbelief against the knowledge of God: behold the frivolous, dissipated, and ignorant characters who dare to tax, with credulity and ignorance, all that the Christian ages have had, and still have, of learned, able, and celebrated personages; they know the language of doubts; but they have learned it by rote, for they have never formed them; they only repeat what they have heard: it is a tradition of ignorance and impiety: they have no doubts; they only preserve, for those to come, the language of irreligion and doubts; they are not unbelievers, they are only the echoes of unbelief; in a word, they know how to express a doubt, but they are too ignorant to doubt themselves.
And a proof of what I advance is, that, in all other doubts, we hesitate only in order to be instructed; every thing is examined which can elucidate the concealed truth. But here the doubt is merely for doubting's sake; a proof that we are equally uninterested in the doubt as in the truth which conceals it from us; they would be very sorry were they under the necessity of clearing up either the falsity or the truth of uncertainties which they pretend to have on our mysteries. Yes, my brethren, were the punishment of doubters to be that of an indispensable obligation to seek the truth, no one would doubt; no one would purchase, at such a price, the pleasure of calling himself an unbeliever; few indeed would be capable of it; decisive proof that they do not doubt, and that they are as little attached to their doubts, as to religion (for their knowledge in both is much about the same); but only that they have lost those first feelings of discretion and of faith which left us still some vestige of respect for the religion of our fathers. Thus, it is doing too much honour to men, so worthy both of pity and contempt, to suppose that they have taken a side, that they have embraced a system; you honour them too much by ranking them among the impious followers of a Socinus, by ennobling them with the shocking titles of deists or atheists: alas! they are nothing; they are of no system; at least, they neither know themselves what they are, nor can they tell us what that system is; and, strange as it may appear, they have found out the secret of forming a state more despicable, more mean, and more unworthy of reason, than even that of impiety; and it is even doing them credit to call them by the shocking title of unbeliever, which had hitherto been considered as the shame of humanity and the highest reproach of man.
And, to conclude this article with a reflection which confirms the same truth, and is very humiliating for our pretended unbe-
