rendered manners atrocious. The distinction of persons establishing in
the state two codes, two orders of criminal justice, two sets of laws,
the people, placed between the propensities of the heart and the oath
uttered from the mouth, had two consciences in contradiction with
each other; and the ideas of justice and injustice had no longer any
foundation in the understanding.

Under such a system, the people fell into dejection and despair; and the
accidents of nature were added to the other evils which assailed them.
Prostrated by so many calamities, they attributed their causes to
superior and hidden powers; and, because they had tyrants on earth, they
fancied others in heaven; and superstition aggravated the misfortunes of
nations.

Fatal doctrines and gloomy and misanthropic systems of religion arose,
which painted their gods, like their despots, wicked and envious. To
appease them, man offered up the sacrifice of all his enjoyments. He
environed himself in privations, and reversed the order of nature.
Conceiving his pleasures to be crimes, his sufferings expiations, he
endeavored to love pain, and to abjure the love of self. He persecuted
his senses, hated his life; and a self-denying and anti-social morality
plunged nations into the apathy of death.

But provident nature having endowed the heart of man with hope
inexhaustible, when his desires of happiness were baffled on this earth,
he pursued it into another world. By a sweet illusion he created for
himself another country--an asylum where, far from tyrants, he should
recover the rights of nature, and thence resulted new disorders. Smitten
with an imaginary world, man despised that of nature. For chimerical
hopes, he neglected realities. His life began to appear a troublesome