The noxious element will always find a
conductor. Any point will produce an explosion. Did the applauded
intercommunity of the pagan theology preserve the peace of the Roman
world? did it prevent oppressions, proscriptions, massacres,
devastation? Was it bigotry that carried Alexander into the East, or
brought Caesar into Gaul? Are the nations of the world into which
Christianity hath not found its way, or from which it hath been
banished, free from contentions? Are their contentions less ruinous and
sanguinary? Is it owing to Christianity, or to the want of it, that the
regions of the East, the countries inter quatuor maria, peninsula of
Greece, together with a great part of the Mediterranean coast, are at
this day a desert? or that the banks of the Nile, whose constantly
renewed fertility is not to be impaired by neglect, or destroyed by the
ravages of war, serve only for the scene of a ferocious anarchy, or the
supply of unceasing hostilities? Europe itself has known no religious
wars for some centuries, yet has hardly ever been without war. Are the
calamities which at this day afflict it to be imputed to Christianity?
Hath Poland fallen by a Christian crusade? Hath the overthrow in France
of civil order and security been effected by the votaries of our
religion, or by the foes? Amongst the awful lessons which the crimes and
the miseries of that country afford to mankind this is one; that in
order to be a persecutor it is not necessary to be a bigot: that in rage
and cruelty, in mischief and destruction, fanaticism itself can be
outdone by infidelity.
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