The nobles perished because they were
noble. The men, women, and children, who had property, because they had
property to be robbed of. The priests were punished, after they had been
robbed of their all, not for their vices, but for their virtues and
their piety, which made them an honor to their sacred profession, and to
that nature of which we ought to be proud, since they belong to it. My
Lord, nothing can be learned from such examples, except the danger of
being kings, queens, nobles, priests, and children, to be butchered on
account of their inheritance. These are things at which not vice, not
crime, not folly, but wisdom, goodness, learning, justice, probity,
beneficence, stand aghast. By these examples our reason and our moral
sense are not enlightened, but confounded; and there is no refuge for
astonished and affrighted virtue, but being annihilated in humility and
submission, sinking into a silent adoration of the inscrutable
dispensations of Providence, and flying with trembling wings from this
world of daring crimes, and feeble, pusillanimous, half-bred, bastard
justice, to the asylum of another order of things, in an unknown form,
but in a better life.
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