Religion, whose influence they wish us to reject, is better appropriated than they think, to the mixture of pride and weakness, which constitutes our nature, and for us, such as we are; its action is far preferable to that of the penal laws; it is not, before his equals, armed with the rod of vengeance, that the culprit is made to appear; it is not to their ignorance, or to their inexorable justice, that he is abandoned; it is at the tribunal of his own conscience, that religion informs against him; before a God, sovereign of the world, that it humbles, and in the name of a tender and merciful Father that it comforts him. Alas! while you at once take from us both our consolation and our true dignity, you wish to refer every thing to private interest and public punishment; but permit me to listen to those commands which come from on high; leave me to divert my attention from the menacing sceptre which the potentates of the earth weild in their hand; leave me to account with Him, before whom they shrink into nothing; leave me, in short, to address myself to him who pardons, and who, at the moment I have offended, permits me still to love him, and rely on his grace!—Alas! without the idea of a God,—without this connexion with a Supreme Being, author of all nature, we should only listen to the vile counsels of selfish prudence, we should only have to flatter and adore the rulers of nations, and all those who in an absolute monarchy, are the numerous representatives of the authority of the prince; yes, talents, sentiments, ought to bend before these distributors of so much good and evil, if nothing exists beyond worldly interest; and when once every one cringes, there is no more dignity in the character, men become incapable of any great action, and unequal to any moral excellence. Religious opinions have the double merit of maintaining us in the obedience due to the laws and the soveriegn, and of nourishing in our hearts a sentiment which sustains our courage, and which reminds men of their true grandeur; teaches submission without meanness, and prevents, above all, cowardly humiliations before transitory idols, in showing at a distance the last period, when all must return to an equality before the Master of the World. The idea of a God, at the same distance from all men, serves also to console us for that shocking superiority of rank and fortune under the oppression of which we live; it is necessary to transport ourselves to the heights religion discovers, to consider with a kind of calmness and indifference the frivolous pretentions of some, and the confident haughtiness of others; and such objects of regret, or of envy, which appeared a Colossus to our imagination, are changed into a grain of sand, when we contrast them with the grand prospects which such sublime meditations display to our view.