man who talks in this fashion?
Who would choose him out from others to tell him of his affairs? Who
would have recourse to him in affliction? And indeed to what use in life
could one put him?

In truth, it is the glory of religion to have for enemies men so
unreasonable: and their opposition to it is so little dangerous that it
serves on the contrary to establish its truths. For the Christian faith
goes mainly to establish these two facts, the corruption of nature, and
redemption by Jesus Christ. Now I contend that if these men do not serve
to prove the truth of the redemption by the holiness of their behaviour,
they at least serve admirably to show the corruption of nature by
sentiments so unnatural.

Nothing is so important to man as his own state, nothing is so
formidable to him as eternity; and thus it is not natural that there
should be men indifferent to the loss of their existence, and to the
perils of everlasting suffering. They are quite different with regard to
all other things. They are afraid of mere trifles; they foresee them;
they feel them. And this same man who spends so many days and nights in
rage and despair for the loss of office, or for some imaginary insult to
his honour, is the very one who knows without anxiety and without
emotion that he will lose all by death. It is a monstrous thing to see
in the same heart and at the same time this sensibility to trifles and
this strange insensibility to the greatest objects. It is an
incomprehensible enchantment, and a supernatural slumber, which
indicates as its cause an all-powerful force.

There must be a strange confusion in the nature of man, that he should
boast of being in that state in which it seems incredible that a single
individual should be. However, experience has shown me so great a
number of such persons that the fact would be surprising, if we did not
know that the greater part of those who trouble themselves about the
matter are disingenuous, and not in fact what they say. They are people
who have heard it said that it is the fashion to be thus daring. It is
what they call shaking off the yoke, and they try to imitate this. But
it would not be difficult to make them understand how greatly they
deceive themselves in thus seeking esteem. This is not the way to gain
it, even I say among those men of the world who take a healthy view of
things, and who know that the only way to succeed in this life is to
make ourselves appear honourable, fai