rains, suspended the refreshing dews, and planted crops of thorns?
When, to render these arid fields productive, their industry constructed
aqueducts, dug canals, and led the distant waters across the desert,
should he have dried up their sources in the mountains? Should he have
blasted the harvests which art had nourished, wasted the plains which
peace had peopled, overthrown cities which labor had created, or
disturbed the order established by the wisdom of man? And what is that
infidelity which founded empires by its prudence, defended them by
its valor, and strengthened them by its justice--which built powerful
cities, formed capacious ports, drained pestilential marshes, covered
the ocean with ships, the earth with inhabitants; and, like the
creative spirit, spread life and motion throughout the world? If such
be infidelity, what then is the true faith? Doth sanctity consist in
destruction? The God who peoples the air with birds, the earth with
animals, the waters with fishes--the God who animates all nature--is he
then a God of ruins and tombs? Demands he devastation for homage, and
conflagration for sacrifice? Requires he groans for hymns, murderers for
votaries, a ravaged and desolate earth for his temple? Behold then, holy
and believing people, what are your works! behold the fruits of your
piety! You have massacred the people, burned their cities, destroyed
cultivation, reduced the earth to a solitude; and you ask the reward
of your works! Miracles then must be performed! The people whom you
extirpated must be recalled to life, the walls rebuilt which you have
overthrown, the harvests reproduced which you have destroyed, the waters
regathered which you have dispersed; the laws, in fine, of heaven and
earth reversed; those laws, established by God himself, in demonstration
of his magnificence and wisdom; those eternal laws, anterior to all
codes, to all the prophets those immutable laws, which neither the
passions nor the ignorance of man can pervert. But that passion which
mistaketh, that ignorance which observeth neither causes nor effects,
hath said in its folly: "All things flow from chance; a blind fatality
poureth out good and evil upon the earth; success is not to the prudent,
nor felicity to the wise;" or, assuming the language of hypocrisy, she
hath said, "all things are from God; he taketh pleasure in deceiving
wisdom and confounding reason." And Ignorance, applauding herself in her
malice, hath said,