nne--I expect
with her a long futurity of happiness and virtue. The most pure religion
is that which makes a continual homage to the Supreme Being, by the
sacrifice of our passions and the fulfilment of our duties. A man's
morality is his worship of God; and it would be degrading the idea we
form of the Creator, to suppose that He wills anything in relation with
His creature, that is not worthy of His intellectual perfection.
Paternal authority, that noble image of a master sovereignly good,
demands nothing of its children that does not tend to make them better
or happier. How then can we imagine that God would exact anything from
man, which has not man himself for its object? You see also what
confusion in the understandings of your people results from the
practice of attaching more importance to religious ceremonies than to
moral duties. It is after Holy Week, you know, that the greatest number
of murders is committed at Rome. The people think, to use the
expression, that they have laid in a stock during Lent, and expend in
assassination the treasures of their penitence. Criminals have been
seen, yet reeking with murder, who have scrupled to eat meat on a
Friday; and gross minds, who have been persuaded that the greatest of
crimes consists in disobeying the discipline of the church, exhaust
their consciences on this head, and conceive that the Deity, like human
sovereigns, esteems submission to his power more than every other
virtue. This is to substitute the sycophancy of a courtier for the
respect which the Creator inspires, as the source and reward of a
scrupulous and delicate life. Catholicism in Italy, confining itself to
external demonstrations, dispenses the soul from meditation and
self-contemplation. When the spectacle is over, the emotion ceases, the
duty is fulfilled, and one is not, as with us, a long time absorbed in
thoughts and sentiments, which give birth to a rigid examination of
one's conduct and heart."

"You are severe, my dear Oswald," replied Corinne; "it is not the first
time I have remarked it. If religion consisted only in a strict
observance of moral duties, in what would it be superior to reason and
philosophy? And what sentiments of piety could we discover, if our
principal aim were to stifle the feelings of the heart? The stoics were
as enlightened as we, as to the duties and the austerity of human
conduct; but that which is peculiar to Christianity is the religious
enthusiasm which blend