ennobling principle in his own heart who wishes to level all the artificial inftitutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive efteem. It is a four, malignant, envious difpofition, without taste for the reality or for any image or representation of virtue, that fees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in fplendour and in honour. I do not like to see any thing destroyed; any void produced in fociety; any ruin on the face of the land. It was therefore with no difappointment or diffatisfaction that my enquiries and obfervation did not present to me any incorrigible vices in the nobleffe of France, or any abufe which could not be removed by a reform very fhort of abolition. Your nobleffe did not deserve punishment; but to degrade is to punish.

It was with the fame fatisfaction I found that the refult of my enquiry concerning your clergy was not diffimilar. It is no foothing news to my ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It is not with much credulity Iliften to any, when they speak evil of thofe whom they are going to plunder. I rather fufpe&t that vices are feigned or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices and abufes there were undoubtedly in that order, and muft be. It was an old establishment, and not frequently revifed. But I faw no crimes in the individuals that merited confifcation of their fubftance, nor those cruel infults and degradations, and that unnatural perfecution which have been substituted in the place of meliorating regulation.

If there had been any just cause, for this new religious perfecution, the atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to plunder, do not love any body fo much as not to dwell with complacence on the vices of the exifting clergy. This they have not done. They find themselves obliged to rake into the hiftories of former ages (which they have ranfacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every inftance of oppreffion and perfecution which has been made by that body or in its favour, in order to juftify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical principles of retaliation, their own perfe

cutions,

cutions, and their own cruelties. After deftroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a fort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate fucceffion, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general defcriptions, is a fort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age. The affembly punishes men, many, if not most, of whom abhor the violent conduct of ecclefiaftics in former times as much as their prefent perfecutors can do, and who would be as loud and as ftrong in the expreffion of that fenfe, if they were not well aware of the purposes for which all this declamation is employed.

Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the members, but not for their punishment. Nations themfelves are fuch corporations. As well might we in England think of waging inexpiable war upon all Frenchmen for the evils which they have brought upon us in the feveral periods of our mutual hoftilities. You might, on your part, think yourselves justified in falling upon all Englishmen on account of the unparalleled calamities. brought upon the people of France by the unjuft invafions of our Henries and our Edwards. Indeed we should be mutually justified in this exterminatory war upon each. other, full as much as you are in the unprovoked perfecution of your prefent countrymen, on account of the conduct of men of the fame name in other times.

We do not draw the moral leffons we might from hiftory. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our inftruction, drawing the materials of future wifdom from the paft errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perverfion, ferve for a magazine, furnishing offenfive and defenfive weapons for parties in church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving diffenfions and animofities, and adding fuel to civil fury. Hiftory confitts, for the greater part, of the miferies brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, luft, fedition, hypocrify, ungoverned zeal, and all the train

T

of

of diforderly appetites, which shake the public with the fame

-"troublous ftorms that tofs

"The private ftate, and render life unsweet." Thefe vices are the causes of thofe ftorms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in fome specious appearance of a real good. You would not fecure men from tyranny and fedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which thefe fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out every thing that is valuable in the human breast. As

thefe are the pretexts, fo the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magiftrates, fenates, parliaments, national affemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by refolving, that there fhould be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in fome fhape muft remain. A certain quantum of power muft always exift in the community, in fome hands, and under fome appellation. Wife men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the caufes of evil which are permanent, not to the occafional organs by which they act, and the tranfitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wife hif torically, a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the fame fashion in their pretexts and the fame modes of mifchief. Wickednefs is a little more inventive. you are difcuffing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very fame vice affumes a new body. The fpirit transmigrates; and, far from lofing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad; it continues its ravages; whilft you are gibbeting the carcafe, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghofts and apparitions, whilst your houfe is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all thofe, who, attending only to the fhell and hufk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilft under colour of abhorring the ill principles

Whilft

of

of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the fame odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.

Your citizens of Paris formerly had lent themselves as the ready inftruments to flaughter the followers of Calvin, at the infamous maffacre of St. Bartholomew. What fhould we fay to thofe who could think of retaliating on the Parifians of this day the abominations and horrors of that time? They are indeed brought to abhor that maffacre. Ferocious as they are, it is not difficult to make them diflike it; becaufe the politicians and fashionable teachers have no intereft in giving their paffions exactly the fame direction. Still however they find it their intereft to keep the fame favage difpofitions alive. It was but the other day that they caufed this very maffacre to be acted on the stage for the diverfion of the defcendants of those who committed it. In this tragic farce they produced the cardinal of Lorraine in his robes of function, ordering general flaughter. Was this fpectacle intended to make the Parifians abhor perfecution, and loath the effufion of blood?—No, it was to teach them to perfecute their own paftors; it was to excite them, by raifing a difguft and horror of their clergy, to an alacrity in hunting down to deftruction an order, which, if it ought to exift at all, ought to exift not only in fafety, but in reverence. It was to ftimulate their cannibal appetites (which one would think had been gorged fufficiently) by variety and feafoning; and to quicken them to an alertnefs in new murders and maffacres, if it fhould fuit the purpose of the Guifes of the day. An affembly, in which fat a multitude of priests and prelates, was obliged to fuffer this indignity at its door. The author was not fent to the gallies, nor the players to the houfe of correction. Not long after this exhibition, thofe players came forward to the affembly to claim the rights of that very religion which they had dared to expofe, and to fhew their proftituted faces in the fenate, whilft the archbishop of Paris, whofe function was known to his people only by his prayers and benedictions, and his wealth only by his alms, is forced to abandon his houfe, and to fly from his flock (as from ravenous wolves)

because,

because, truly, in the fixteenth century, the Cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer.

Such is the effect of the perverfion of hiftory, by thofe, who, for the fame nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of learning. But thofe who will stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obfcures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can afcend but the spirit and moral quality of human actions, will fay to the teachers of the Palais Royal,-the Cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of the fixteenth century, you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth; and this is the only difference between you. But hiftory, in the nineteenth century, better understood, and better employed, will, I truft, teach a civilized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous ages. It will teach future priefts and magiftrates not to retaliate upon. the fpeculative and inactive atheifts of future times, the enormities committed by the prefent practical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error, which, in its quiefcent ftate, is more than punished whenever it is embraced. It will teach pofterity not to make war upon either religion or philofophy, for the abufe which the hypocrites of both have made of the two moft valuable bleffings conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal Patron, who in all things eminently favours and protects the race of man.

If your clergy, or any clergy, fhould fhew themselves vicious beyond the fair bounds allowed to human infirmity, and to thofe profeffional faults which can hardly be feparated from profeffional virtues, though their vices never can countenance the exercise of oppreffion, I do admit, that they would naturally have the effect of abating very much of our indignation against the tyrants who exceed meafure and juftice in their punishment. I can allow in clergymen, through all their divifions, fome tenaciousness of their own opinion; fome overflowings of zeal for its propagation; fome predilection to their own state and office; fome attachment to the intereft of their own corps; fome preference to thofe who liften with

docility