Sometimes, persons terrified by their imaginations, or by the confused picture which they form of the duties of religion, attach themselves to superstitious practices as a safeguard near at hand which may quickly guard them from the different anxieties of their minds. The precepts of the gospel are designed to destroy these dispositions; for on one side, they facilitate the study of morality, by reducing to simple principles the entire system of our duties; and on the other, they seek to render our intercourse with the Supreme Being more easy, by teaching us that we may unite ourselves to Him by the expansion of a pure mind; by informing us, that it is not either on Mount Sion or Gerizim that we are to raise an altar; but that every honest heart is a temple, where the eternal is adored _in spirit and in truth_. The Christian religion is the only one which, discarding ceremonies and superstitious opinions, leads us to the worship more consonant to our nature: Christianity indeed, in that grand thought, has pointed out the dictates of our conscience as most worthy of respect; benevolence, as the worship most agreeable to the Supreme Being, and all our moral conduct as the most certain prognostic of our future state. There reigns a profound philosophy in the doctrines of the gospel, men have only added a vain pageantry, a more sounding tone. Let us render homage to Christianity, for that sacred tie which it has formed, in uniting not for a moment, but for the whole of life, the fate of two beings, one having need of support, and the other of comfort: it is religion which refines this alliance by rendering it immutable, and obliges men not to sacrifice to the caprices of their imaginations the unity and confidence which secures the repose of families, order in the disposition of fortunes, the peaceable education of the succeeding generation, and which, in giving to children, for an example, a union formed by fidelity and duty, implants in their hearts the seeds of the most important virtues; religion has taught us, that the friendships of a world, in which selfishness reigns, have need of being cemented by that community of interests and honours which marriage only gives us an idea of; holy union, alliance without equal, which renders still more valuable all the blessings of life, which seems to augment our hopes, and fortify in us the comfortable thoughts and mild confidence which piety gives birth to: the engagements entered into between men, which being, for the most part, sounded on reciprocal services, a time might come, when our weakness would be so great, others having no more interest to associate with us, it might be necessary to find a support in that friendship which time has matured, and of which a sentiment of duty repairs the breaches, and which acquires a kind of sanctity from the habit and the remembrance of a long and happy union: it is religion in, short, which has ordained, that the delicate virtue, the most