We read in several modern books, that with good laws we should always have morality sufficient; but I cannot adopt this opinion. Man is a being so compounded, and his relations with his species are so various and so fine, that to regulate his mind, and direct his conduct, he has need of a multitude of sentiments, on which the commands of the sovereign have not any hold; they are all simple and declared duties, which the legislators have reduced to precepts, and this rough building, termed civil laws, leaves vacancies throughout. The laws require merely a blind obedience; and as they enjoin and defend only actions, are absolutely indifferent to the private sentiments of men; the moral edifice which they raise is in several parts a mere exterior form, and it is at the roof, if I may say so, that they have begun. Religion proceeds in a manner diametrically opposite; it is in the heart, it is in the recesses of conscience, that it lays its first base; it appears to be acquainted with the grand secrets of nature; it sows in the earth a grain, and this grain is nourished, and transformed into numerous branches, which, without any effort, spring up, and extend themselves to all dimensions and in every kind of form. I will suppose, nevertheless, that we believed it sufficient for the maintenance of public order, to reduce morality to the spirit of civil laws, it would still be out of the power of men to draw from this assimilation familiar instructions proper to form a code of education; for these laws, simple in their commands, are not so in their principles. We perceive not immediately why revenge, the most just, is prohibited; why we have not the power to do ourselves justice by the same means a ravisher would use; why we have not a right to resist with violence the tyrannic oppressor; in short, why certain actions, some indifferent in themselves, and some hurtful to others, are condemned in a general and uniform manner: a kind of combination is necessary to discover, that the legislator himself is wandering from natural ideas, in order to prevent every person from being a judge in his own cause, and to avoid that, those exceptions and distinctions, of which every circumstance is susceptible, might never be determined by the judgment of individuals. In the same manner, from those indirect motives, the laws treat with more rigour an offence difficult to define, than a disorder more reprehensible in itself; but of which the excesses might be easily perceived: and they observe still the same rule with respect to crimes which are surrounded by greater allurements, though this seduction is even a motive for indulgence in the eyes of simple justice; in short, the laws, in adopting a more determinate method, to constrain debtors to the discharge of their obligations, prove that they are not compassionate to unforeseen misfortunes, nor actuated by other motives of equity which merit an equal interest; all their attention is fixed on