They are renegadoes from that impious faith for which they subverted the
ancient government, murdered their king, and imprisoned, butchered,
confiscated, and banished their fellow-subjects, and to which they
forced every man to swear at the peril of his life. And now, to
reconcile themselves to the world, they declare this creed, bought by so
much blood, to be an imposture and a chimera. I have no doubt that they
always thought it to be so, when they were destroying everything at home
and abroad for its establishment. It is no strange thing, to those who
look into the nature of corrupted man, to find a violent persecutor a
perfect unbeliever of his own creed. But this is the very first time
that any man or set of men were hardy enough to attempt to lay the
ground of confidence in them by an acknowledgment of their own
falsehood, fraud, hypocrisy, treachery, heterodox doctrine,
persecution, and cruelty. Everything we hear from them is new, and, to
use a phrase of their own, _revolutionary_; everything supposes a total
revolution in all the principles of reason, prudence, and moral feeling.
If possible, this their recantation of the chief parts in the canon of
the Rights of Man is more infamous and causes greater horror than their
originally promulgating and forcing down the throats of mankind that
symbol of all evil.
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