Who would desire to have for a friend a 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 shoul