We can then, in the name of reason, of policy, and philosophy, demand some respect for them; and I ought to repeat, since it is time for me to resume my subject, that esteem or contempt, honour or shame, are so far from being able to supply the place of the active influence of religion, that its sentiments confirm the opinion of the world, and, more or less, obviously direct it. It follows, that we should soon reason shrewdly, on the value which we ought to set on the esteem of the world, if the expression of its approbation was not united in our contemplation to something more noble than the judgment of mankind, and if an awful respect for virtue was not imbibed by means of a religious education. We should soon experience that, in wishing to found every thing on the calculations of worldly wisdom, these same calculations would destroy all; and morality having at once lost its grand support, we should try in vain to prop it by a scaffold of laws, and the vain efforts of an opinion without a guide. Hypocrisy and dissimulation would become immediately a necessary science, a legitimate defence, which would weary the attention of every inspector; and testimonies of esteem appearing only an ingenious encouragement granted to the sacrifices of selfishness, the applause decreed to a generous mode of conduct would be insensibly discredited by those who gave and by those who received them, and would end, perhaps, in becoming a secret object of derision, as mere play from one to another. Every thing is replaced and firmly established by religion; it surrounds, I may say, the whole system of morality, resembling that universal and mysterious force of physical nature, which retains the planets in their orbits, and subjects them to a regular revolution; and which, in the midst of the general order it maintains, escapes the observation of men, and appears to their feeble sight unconscious of its own work. CHAP. III. _An Objection drawn from our natural Dispositions to Goodness._ Men, according to the opinion of some, have received from nature a secret tendency towards every thing just, good, and virtuous; and from this happy inclination, the task of the moralist is confined to prevent the alteration of our original constitution: an easy task, add they, and which may be fulfilled without any extraordinary effort, and without having recourse to religion.