entation of these events and crimes? It is that he
does not see them with the same eyes, he sees them with the eyes of the
author and the actor. He is no longer the same man; he was a barbarian,
he was agitated by furious passions when he saw an innocent woman
killed, when he stained himself with his friend's blood. His soul was
filled with stormy tumult; it is tranquil, it is empty; nature returns
to it; he sheds virtuous tears. That is the true merit, the great good
of the theatres; there is achieved what can never be achieved by the
frigid declamations of an orator paid to bore the whole of an audience
for an hour.

David the capitoul, who, without emotion, caused and saw the death of
innocent Calas on the wheel, would have shed tears at the sight of his
own crime in a well-written and well-spoken tragedy.

It is thus that Pope has said in the prologue to Addison's Cato:--

"Tyrants no more their savage nature kept;
And foes to virtue wondered how they wept."

_THEIST_

The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a Supreme Being
as good as He is powerful, who has formed all beings with extension,
vegetating, sentient and reflecting; who perpetuates their species, who
punishes crimes without cruelty, and rewards virtuous actions with
kindness.

The theist does not know how God punishes, how he protects, how he
pardons, for he is not reckless enough to flatter himself that he knows
how God acts, but he knows that God acts and that He is just.
Difficulties against Providence do not shake him in his faith, because
they are merely great difficulties, and not proofs. He submits to this
Providence, although he perceives but a few effects and a few signs of
this Providence: and, judging of the things he does not see by the
things he sees, he considers that this Providence reaches all places and
all centuries.

Reconciled in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not
embrace any of the sects, all of which contradict each other; his
religion is the most ancient and the most widespread; for the simple
worship of a God has preceded all the systems of the world. He speaks a
language that all peoples understand, while they do not understand one
another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all wise
men as his brethren. He believes that religion does not consist either
in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, or in vain display, but
in worship and justic