even a thought; let them but tranquilly enjoy their crimes, and they will agree to every thing.
Thus the majority of atheists, who have left in writing the wretched fruits of their impiety, have always striven to prove there was nothing above us; that all died with the body, and that future punishments or rewards were fables; to attract followers it was necessary to secure the suffrage of the passions. If ever they attacked the other points of religion, it was only to come to the main conclusion, that there is nothing after this life; that vices or virtues are names invented by policy to restrain the people; and that the passions are only natural and innocent inclinations, which every one may follow, because every one finds them in himself.
Behold why the impious, in the Book of Wisdom, the Sadducees themselves, in the Gospel, who may be considered as the fathers and predecessors of our unbelievers, never took any pains to refute the truth of the miracles related in the books of Moses, and which God formerly wrought in favour of his people, nor the promise of the Mediator made to their fathers: they attacked only the resurrection of the dead, and the immortality of the soul: that point decided every thing for them. " Man dies like the beast," said they in the Book of Wisdom; " we know not if their nature be different, but their end and their lot are the same: trouble us no more, therefore, with a futurity which is not: let us enjoy life; let us refuse ourselves no gratification: time is short; let us hasten to live, for we shall die to-morrow, and because all shall die with us." No, my brethren, unbelief hath always originated in the passions. The yoke of faith is never rejected but in order to shake off the yoke of duties; and religion would never have an enemy, were it not the enemy of licentiousness and vice.
But, if the doubts of our unbelievers are not real, in consequence
of being formed solely by licentiousness, they are also false, because it is ignorance which adopts without comprehending them, and vanity which makes a boast without being able to make a resource of them: this is what now remains to me to unfold.
Part II. — The same answer might be made to the majority of those who are continually vaunting their doubts upon religion, and find nothing but contradictions in what faith obliges us to believe, that Tertullian formerly made to the heathens, upon all the reproaches they invented against the mysteries, and the doctrine of Jesus Christ. They condemn, said he, what they do not understand: they blame what they have never examined, and what they know only by hearsay; they blaspheme what they are ignorant of, and they are ignorant of it because they hate it too much to give themselves the trouble of searching into and knowing it. Now, continues this father, nothing is more indecent and foolish than boldly to decide upon what they know not; and all that religion would require of these frivolous and dissolute men, who so warmly rise up against it, is, not to condemn before they are well acquainted with it.
