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.
