lievers, I observe, that they who affect to treat us as weak and credulous minds, who vaunt their reason, who accuse us of grounding a religion upon the popular prejudices, and of believing solely because our predecessors have believed; they, I say, are unbelievers, and doubt upon the sole and deplorable authority of a debauchee, whom they have often heard to say that futurity is a bugbear, and made use of as a scarecrow to frighten only children and the common people; such is their only knowledge and their only use of reason. They are impious, as they accuse us of being believers without examination, and through credulousness, but through a credulity which can find no excuse but in madness and folly; the authority of a single impious discourse, pronounced in a bold and decisive tone, hath subjugated their reason, and ranked them in the lists of impiety. They call us credulous, in yielding to the authority of the prophets, of the apostles, of men inspired by God, of the shining miracles wrought to establish the truth of our mysteries, and to that venerable tradition of holy pastors, who, from age to age, have transmitted to us the charge of doctrine and of truth, that is to say, to the greatest authority that hath ever been on the earth; and they think themselves less credulous, and it appears to them more worthy of reason, to submit to the authority of a freethinker, who, in a moment of debauchery, pronounces, with a firm tone, that there is no God, yet most likely inwardly belies his own words! — Ah! my brethren, how much does man degrade and render himself contemptible when he arrogates a false glory from being no longer in the belief of a God!
Thus, why is it, think you, that our pretended unbelievers are so desirous of seeing real atheists confirmed in impiety; that they seek and entice them even from foreign countries, like a Spinosa, if the fact be, that he was called into France to be heard and consulted? It is because our unbelievers are not firm in unbelief, nor can they find any who are so; and, in order to harden themselves, they would gladly see some one actually confirmed in that detestable cause; they seek, in precedent, resources, and defences against their own conscience; and, not daring of themselves to become impious, they expect from an example what their reason and even their heart refuses; and, in so doing, they surely fall into a credulity much more childish and absurd than that with which they reproach believers. A Spinosa, that monster, who, after embracing various religions, ended with none, was most anxious to find out some professed freethinker who might confirm him in the cause of irreligion and atheism: he formed to himself that impenetrable chaos of impiety, that work of confusion and darkness in which the sole desire of not believing in God can support the weariness and disgust of those who read it; in which, excepting the impiety, all is unintelligible, and which would, from its birth, have sunk into oblivion, had it not, to the shame of humanity, attacked the Supreme Being: that impious wretch, I say, lived concealed, retired, tranquil: his dark productions were his only occupation, and, to harden himself he needed only himself. But those who so eagerly
