Part I. — Man had been placed upon the earth for the sole purpose of rendering, to the author of his being, that glory and that homage which were his due. All called him to these duties; and every thing, which ought to have called, removed him from them. To his Supreme Majesty he owed his adoration and his homage; to his paternal goodness, his love; to his infinite wisdom, the sacrifice of his reason and of his lights. These duties, engraven on his heart, and born with him, were still also incessantly proclaimed to him by all creatures; he could neither listen to himself, nor to all things around him, without finding them; nevertheless, he forgets, he effaces them from his heart. He no longer saw, in the work, that honour and that worship which were due to the sovereign Architect; in the blessings with which he loaded him, that love which he owed to his benefactor; in the obscurity spread through even natural causes, that impossibility, much less, of fathoming the secrecies of God, and that mistrust, in which he ought to live, of his own lights. Idolatry, therefore, rendered to the creature that worship which the Creator had reserved for himself alone: the synagogue honoured him from the lips, and that love, which it owed to him, was confined to external homages totally unworthy of him: philosophy lost itself in its own ideas, measured the lights of God by those of men, and vainly believed that reason, which knew not itself, was able to know all truth: three sores, spread over the face of the whole earth. In a word, God was no longer either known or glorified, and man was no longer known to himself.
And, first, to what excesses had idolatry not carried its profane worship? The death of a person loved, quickly exalted him to a divinity; and his vile ashes, on which his nothingness was stamped in characters so indelible, became themselves the title of his glory and of his immortality. Conjugal love made gods to itself; impure love followed the example, and determined to have its altars: the wife and the mistress, the husband and the lover, had temples, priests, and sacrifices. The folly, or the general corruption, adopted a worship so ridiculous and so abominable; the whole universe was infected with it; the majesty of the laws of the empire authorized it; and the magnificence of the temples, the pomp of the sacrifices, the immense riches of the images, rendered that folly respectable. Every people was jealous in having their gods; in default of man they offered incense to the beast; impure homages became the worship of these impure divinities; the towns, the mountains, the fields, the deserts, were stained with them, and beheld superb edifices consecrated to pride, to lasciviousness, to revenge. The number of the divinities equalled that of the passions; the gods were almost as numerous as the men; all became god with man; and the true God was the only one unknown to man.
The world was plunged, almost from its creation, in the horror of this darkness; every age had added to it fresh impieties. In proportion as the appointed time of the Deliverer drew near, the depravity of men seemed to increase. Rome itself, mistress of
