his prayers and benedictions, and his wealth only by his alms, is forced to abandon his house, and to fly from his flock (as from ravenous wolves) be|cause, truly, in the sixteenth century, the Cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer.
Such is the effect of the perversion of history, by those, who, for the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of learning. But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparison, which ob|scures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the Palais Royal,—the Cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of the sixteenth cen|tury, you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth; and this is the only difference be|tween you. But history, in the nineteenth century, better understood, and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilized posterity to abhor the mis|deeds of both these barbarous ages. It will teach future priests and magistrates not to retaliate upon the speculative and inactive atheists of future times, the enormities committed by the present practical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error, which, in its quiescent state, is more than punished whenever it is embraced. It will teach posterity not to make war upon either religion or philoso|phy, for the abuse which the hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings con|ferred upon us by the bounty of the universal Pa|tron,
