The Spirit of Infidelity.
THE spirit of infidelity has the heart of a wolf, the fangs of a tiger, and the talons of a vulture. Blood is its proper nourishment; and it scents its prey with the nerves of a hound, and hovers over a field of death on the sooty pinions of a fiend. Unlike all other animals of prey, it feeds upon its own kind; and when glutted with the blood of others, turns back upon those who have been its coadjutors, and who, if either its disposition or its measures could admit of friendship, would have been its friends. Between ninety and one hundred of those who were leaders in this mighty work of destruction [the French Revolution] fell by the hand of violence. Enemies to all men, they were of course enemies to each other. Butchers of the human race, they soon whetted the knife for each other's throats; and the tremendous Being who rules the universe, whose existence they had denied in a solemn act of legislation, whose perfections they had made the butt of public scorn and private insult, whose Son they had crucified afresh, and whose word they had burned by the hand of the common hangman, swept them all by the hand of violence into an untimely grave. The tale made every ear which heard it tingle, and every heart chill with horror. It was, in the language of Ossian, “the song of death.” It was like the reign of the plague in a populous city. Knell tolled upon knell; hearse followed hearse; and coffin rumbled after coffin, without a mourner to shed a tear upon the corpse, or a solitary attendant to mark the place of the grave. “From one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another,” the world went forth and looked upon the carcasses of the men who had transgressed against God, and they were an abhorring unto all flesh.—President Dwight’s Fast Sermon, 1812.