Penal laws ought to be avoided in respect to
religion: they imprint fear, it is true; but as religion has also penal
laws which inspire the same passion, the one is effaced by the other,
and between these two different kinds of fear the mind becomes hardened.
The threatenings of religion are so terrible, and its promises so
great, that when they actuate the mind, whatever efforts the magistrate
may use to oblige us to renounce it, he seems to leave us nothing when
he deprives us of the exercise of our religion, and to bereave us of
nothing when we are allowed to profess it.
It is not, therefore, by filling the soul with the idea of this
great object, by hastening her approach to that critical moment in which
it ought to be of the highest importance, that religion can be most
successfully attacked: a more certain way is to tempt her by favours, by
the conveniences of life, by hopes of fortune; not by that which
revives, but by that which extinguishes the sense of her duty; not by
that which shocks her, but by that which throws her into indifference at
the time when other passions actuate the mind, and those which religion
inspires are hushed into silence. As a general rule in changing a
religion the invitations should be much stronger than the penalties.
The temper of the human mind has appeared even in the nature of
punishments. If we take a survey of the persecutions in Japan,
[20]
we shall find that they were more shocked at cruel torments than at long
sufferings, which rather weary than affright, which are the more
difficult to surmount, from their appearing less difficult.
In a word, history sufficiently informs us that penal laws have
never had any other effect than to destroy.
