eulogiums on righteousness, finds no character amongst the upright who is entitled to them; I say, that such language, of which so little scruple is made by the world, saps religion, and tends toward rendering all virtue suspicious: I say, that you thereby furnish arms to the impious in an age when too many other scandals countenance and authorize impiety. You assist in making them believe that none, truly pious, exist on the earth; that even the saints, who have formerly edified the church, and whose memory we so warmly cherish, have held out to men only a false spectacle of virtue, of which, in reality, they had only the phantom and the appearances: and that the Gospel hath never formed but pharisees and hypocrites. Do you, my brethren, comprehend all the guilt of these foolish derisions? You think that you are only deriding false virtue, and you are blaspheming religion. I repeat it; in mistrusting the sincerity of the just whom you see, the freethinker concludes that all who have preceded them, and whom we see not, were equally insincere; that the martyrs themselves, who met death with such fortitude, and who rendered to truth the most shining and least suspicious testimony which can be given by man, were only madmen, who sought a human glory by a vain ostentation of courage and heroism; and lastly, that the venerable tradition of so many saints, who, from age to age, have honoured and edified the church is merely a tradition of knavery and deceit. And would to God that this were only a transport of zeal and exaggeration! These blasphemies, which strike us with such horror, and which ought to have been buried with Paganism, we have still the sorrow to hear repeated among us. And you who shudder at them, unknowingly put them, however, into the mouth of the freethinker; it is your continual sarcasms and censures upon piety which have rendered, in our days, impiety so general and so uncurbed.
I do not add, that, by these means, every thing in society becomes dubious and uncertain. There is no longer, then, either good faith, integrity, or fidelity among men. For, if we must no longer depend on the sincerity and virtue of the just; if their piety be only a mask to their passions, we assuredly will not place any confidence in the probity of sinners and worldly characters: all men are consequently only cheats and villains, of whom too much care cannot be taken, and with whom we ought to live as with enemies; and these so much the more to be dreaded, as, under a treacherous outside of friendship and humanity, they conceal the design of either deceiving or ruining us. None but a heart profoundly wicked and corrupted can suppose such iniquity and corruption in that of others.
And behold the second character of that temerity of which we speak. Yes, my brethren, that fund of malignity, which sees guilt through the appearances even of virtue, and attributes criminal intentions to works of holiness, can proceed only from a black and corrupted heart. As the passions have poisoned your heart, you whom this discourse regards, — as you are capable yourself of every duplicity and meanness, — as you have nothing in your own breast
