among men, he for ever does away all paternal names and rights, which, even in animals, nature hath so evidently respected; and gives to the earth men all uncertain of their origin, all coming into the world, without parents, as I may say; and, consequently, without ties, tenderness, affection, or humanity; all in a situation to become incestuous, or parricides, without even knowing it.
Others came to announce to men, that voluptuousness was the sovereign good; and whatever might have been the intention of the first author of this sect, it is certain that his disciples sought no other felicity than that of brutes; the most shameful debaucheries became philosophical maxims. Rome, Athens, Corinth, beheld excesses, where, it may be said, that man was no longer man. Even this is nothing; the most abominable vices were consecrated there: temples and altars were erected to them: lasciviousness, incest, cruelty, treachery, and other still more abandoned crimes, were made divinities of: the worship became a public debauch and prostitution: and gods, so criminal, were no longer honoured but by crimes; and the apostle, who relates them to us, takes care to inform us, that such was not merely the licentiousness of the people, but of sages and philosophers who had erred in the vanity of their own thoughts, and whom God had delivered up to the corruption of their own heart. O God! in permitting human reason to fall into such horrible errors, thou intendest to let man know, that reason when delivered up to its own darkness, is capable of every thing, and that it can never take upon itself to be its own guide, without plunging into abysses from which thy law and thy light are alone capable of withdrawing him.
Lastly. If the depravity of reason so evidently expose the necessity of a remedy to cure it, its eternal inconstancies and fluctuations yet more instruct man that a check and a rule are absolutely necessary to fix it.
And here, my brethren, if the brevity of a discourse would permit all to be said, what vain disputes, what endless questions, what different opinions have formerly engrossed all the schools of the heathen philosophy! And think not that it was upon matters which God seems to have yielded up to the contestation of men; it was upon the nature even of God, upon his existence, upon the immortality of the soul, upon the true felicity.
Some doubted the whole; others believed that they knew every thing. Some denied a God; others gave us one of their own fashioning; that is to say, some of them slothful, an indolent spectator of human things, and tranquilly leaving to chance the management of his own work, as a care unworthy of his greatness, and incompatible with his conveniency; some others made him the slave of fates, and subject to laws which he had no hand in imposing upon himself: others again incorporated, with the whole universe, the soul of that vast body, and composing, as it were, a part of that world which is entirely his work. Many others of ' which I know nothing, for I pretend not to recapitulate them all; but as many schools, so many were the sentiments upon so essential a
