It was not in the thirteenth or fourteenth century that this affair
happened; it was in the eighteenth. Foreign nations judge of France by
its spectacles, romances, and pretty verses; by opera girls who have
very sweet manners, by opera dancers who posssess grace; by
Mademoiselle Clairon, who declaims delightfully. They know not that,
under all, there is not a more cruel nation than the French. The
Russians were considered barbarians in 1700; this is only the year 1769;
yet an empress has just given to this great state laws which would do
honor to Minos, Numa, or Solon, if they had had intelligence enough to
invent them. The most remarkable is universal tolerance; the second is
the abolition of torture. Justice and humanity have guided her pen; she
has reformed all. Woe to a nation which, being more civilized, is still
led by ancient atrocious customs! "Why should we change our
jurisprudence?" say we. "Europe is indebted to us for cooks, tailors,
and wig-makers; therefore, our laws are good."
TRANSUBSTANTIATION.
Protestants, and above all, philosophical Protestants, regard
transubstantiation as the most signal proof of extreme impudence in
monks, and of imbecility in laymen. They hold no terms with this belief,
which they call monstrous, and assert that it is impossible for a man of
good sense ever to have believed in it. It is, say they, so absurd, so
contrary to every physical law, and so contradictory, it would be a sort
of annihilation of God, to suppose Him capable of such inconsistency.
Not only a god in a wafer, but a god in the place of a wafer; a thousand
crumbs of bread become in an instant so many gods, which an innumerable
crowd of gods make only one god. Whiteness without a white substance;
roundness without rotundity of body; wine changed into blood, retaining
the taste of wine; bread changed into flesh and into fibres, still
preserving the taste of bread--all this inspires such a degree of horror
and contempt in the enemies of the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman
religion, that it sometimes insensibly verges into rage.
Their horror augments when they are told that, in Catholic countries,
are monks who rise from a bed of impurity, and with unwashed hands make
gods by hundreds; who eat and drink these gods, and reduce them to the
usual consequences of such an operation. But when they reflect that this
superstition, a thousand times more absurd and sacrilegious than those
of Egypt, produces for an Italian priest from fifteen to twenty millions
of revenue, and the domination of a country containing a hundred
thousand square leagues, they are ready to march with their arms in
their hands and drive away this priest from the palace of Cæsar. I know
not if I shall be of the party, because I love peace; but when
established at Rome, I will certainly pay them a visit.--By M.
GUILLAUME, a Protestant minister.
TRINITY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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