I have only glanced over the benefits arising from the Christian religion; but I cannot avoid observing, that we owe to it a consoling idea, that of the felicity reserved for innocent babes; interesting and precious hope for those tender mothers, who see slip from their embraces the objects of their love, at an age when they have not acquired any merit before the Supreme Being, whom they cannot have any relation with, but through His infinite goodness. I feel that I involuntarily mix with the elogiums of Christianity a sentiment of gratitude for the mild and paternal ideas which are disseminated with its instructions; and there is something remarkable in those instructions, that they are continually animated by every thing which can captivate our imagination, and associate with our natural inclinations. Sensibility, happiness, and hope, are the strongest ties of a heart still pure; and all the emotions which elevate towards the idea of a God exalt in our minds the doctrine of morality, which recals us continually to the sublime perfections of Him who was its author. In short, we cannot avoid admiring the spirit of moderation, which forms one of the distinct characteristics of the gospel; we do not always find, it is true, the same spirit in the interpreters of the Christian doctrines; several constrained by a false zeal, and more disposed to speak in the name of a threatening master, than in that of a God, full of wisdom and goodness, have frequently exaggerated and multiplied the duties of men; and to support their system, they have often obscured the natural sense, or the general import of the precepts contained in the scriptures; and sometimes also, collecting a few scattered words, they have formed a body of divinity, foreign in several respects to the intention of the apostles and first Christians. Servants always go further than their masters; and as the first thought does not belong to them, they only act by adding something heterogeneous: the spirit of moderation consists, beside, in a kind of proportion, which mere imitators have only an imperfect knowledge of; fortitude is even necessary to impose limits on virtue itself; and to determine the precise and exact measure of the multiplied duties of men requires a profound and sublime intelligence. It was by his sublime precepts that the institutor of a universal morality shewed himself superior to that age of ignorance in which extremes reigned; when piety was changed into superstition, justice into rigour, indulgence into weakness; and when, in the exaggeration of every sentiment, a kind of merit was sought for incompatible with the immutable laws of wisdom: it was by those sublime precepts, in short, that a legislator rose above transitory opinions to command all times and ages, and that he appears to have been desirous to adapt his instructions, not to the instantaneous humour of a people, but to the nature of man.