Do not think we exceed the truth of the matter, or that we are endeavoring to obtain your attention by paradoxes. In all good faith, I speak as I think, I find more refinement, and even, if I may venture to say so, a less fund of corruption in men who, having resolved to abandon themselves to the torrent of their passions, strive to persuade themselves, either that there is no God in heaven, or that he pays no attention to what men do on earth; than in those who, believing in a God who sees them and heeds them, live as if they believed nothing of the sort. Infidels were not able to support, in their excesses, the idea of a benefactor outraged, of a Supreme Judge provoked to anger, of an eternal salvation neglected, of a hell braved, _a lake burning with fire and brimstone_, and _smoke ascending up for ever and ever_. It was necessary, in order to give free course to their passions it was necessary for them to put far away from their eyes these terrifying objects, and to efface from their minds these overwhelming truths. But you, you who believe that there is a God in heaven, you who believe yourselves under his eye, and who insult him without remorse and without repentance, you who believe that this God holds the thunderbolt in his hand to crush sinners, and who live in sin, you who believe that there are devouring flames and chains of darkness, and who brave their horrors, you who believe the soul immortal, and who concern yourselves only with time; what forehead, what forehead of brass, is the one you wear! One thing in just qualification of the praise due to Saurin for his pulpit eloquence requires to be added. When he attempts the figure of apostrophe, as he frequently does, personifying inanimate objects and addressing them in the way of oratoric appeal, he is very apt to produce a frigid effect, the absolute opposite of genuine eloquence. Nothing but imagination white-hot with passion justifies, in the use of the orator, the expedient of such apostrophe as this which Saurin affects. With Saurin, both the necessary imagination and the necessary passion seem somehow to fail; and he possessed neither the perfect judgment nor the perfect taste, nor yet the fine feeling, that might have chastised the audacities to which his ambition incited him. His rhetorically bold things he did in a certain cold-blooded way; so that, with him, what should have been the climax of oratoric effectiveness, or else not been at all, produces sometimes instead a reaction and recoil of disappointment. We thus indicate a shortcoming in Saurin which deposes this great preacher, one is compelled to admit, despite his remarkable merits, from the first into the second rank of orators.