In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit
from one form of government to another--you cannot see that character
of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country.
With us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how
it can act when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be
supposed to confine those observations to any description of men, or to
comprehend all men of any description within them--No! far from it. I am
as incapable of that injustice, as I am of keeping terms with those who
profess principles of extremes; and who, under the name of religion,
teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these
politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in
order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used
in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the
mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not
a little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation. This
sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of
man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one
new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up
those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in
those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human
breast.
This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit
through all the political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem
to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap,
bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to
their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a
magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse
the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years'
security, and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The
preacher found them all in the French revolution. This inspires a
juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he
advances; and when he arrives at his peroration it is in a full blaze.
Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy,
flourishing, and glorious state of France, as in a bird-eye landscape of
a promised land, he breaks out into rapture.