"I am very fond of pleasure; I will therefore give myself wholly up to
gratify my senses, to lead a voluptuous life, to have the spectacle
follow the feast, debauchery the spectacle, and so on; but I will
never take the least pains to secure that _fullness of joy_ which is
at _God's right hand_, that _river of pleasure_ whereof he gives to
drink to those _who put their trust under the shadow of his wings_.
"I hate constraint and trouble; I will apply myself therefore
exclusively to escape the idea of emotions of penitence, above all,
the idea of prison cells, of exile, of the rack, of the stake; but I
will brave the chains of darkness with their weight, the demons with
their fury, hell with its torments, eternity with its horrors. I have
made my decision; I consent to curse eternally the day of my birth, to
look eternally upon annihilation as a blessing beyond price, to seek
eternally for death without being able to find it, to vomit eternally
blasphemies against my Creator, to hear eternally the howlings of the
damned, to howl eternally with them, and to be eternally, like them,
the object of that sentence, Depart from me, ye cursed, into
everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." Once more,
Where is the wretch desperate enough to digest these propositions? Yet
these are the motives to vice.
To illustrate the point-blank directness, the almost excessive fidelity,
amounting to something very like truculence, with which Saurin would
train his guns and fire his broadsides into the faces and eyes of his
hearers, let the following, our final citation, serve; we quote from the
conclusion to a powerful sermon on infidelity:
Let us here put a period to this discourse. We turn to you, my
brethren.... You congratulate yourselves for the most part,... on
detesting infidelity, and on respecting religion. But shall we tell
you, my brethren, how odious soever the men are whom we have just been
describing, we know of others more odious still. There is a
restriction in the judgment which the prophet pronounces on the first,
when he calls them, in the words of my text, the most foolish and the
most brutish among the people; and there are men who surpass them in
brutality and in extravagance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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