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 forgot 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 the following rapture:—­

“What an eventful period is this!  I am thankful that I have lived to it; I could almost say, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.—­I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error.—­I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it.—­I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects."[88]