PARIS, July 31, 1762.
You reproach us with lukewarmness, but I believe I have told you already
that the fear of the fagot is very cooling. You would like us to print
the Testament of Jean Meslier and distribute four or five thousand
copies. The infamous fanaticism, for infamous it is, would lose little
or nothing, and we should be treated as fools by those whom we would
have converted. Man is so little enlightened to-day only because we had
the precaution or the good fortune to enlighten him little by little. If
the sun should appear all of a sudden in a cave, the inhabitants would
perceive only the harm it would do their eyes. The excess of light would
result only in blinding them.