Les ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires

which founded empires through prudence, defended them through courage, and strengthened them through justice; which raised powerful cities, dug deep ports, drained pestilential marshes, covered the sea with vessels, the earth with inhabitants, and, like the creative spirit, spread movement and life over the world? If such is impiety, what is true belief? Does holiness consist in destroying? Is the God who peoples the air with birds, the earth with animals, and the waves with reptiles; the God who animates entire nature, then a God of ruins and tombs? Does he demand devastation for homage, and fire for sacrifice? Does he want groans for hymns, murderers for worshippers, and a deserted and ravaged world for a temple? Yet here, holy and faithful races, are your works! Here are the fruits of your piety! You have killed peoples, burned cities, destroyed cultures, and reduced the earth to solitude; and you demand the reward for your works! It will surely be necessary to produce miracles for you! It will be necessary to resurrect

the laborers whom you slaughter, to rebuild the walls that you overthrow, to reproduce the harvests that you destroy, to gather the waters that you disperse, and finally to oppose all the laws of the heavens and the earth; those laws established by God himself, as a demonstration of his magnificence and his grandeur; those eternal laws prior to all codes, to all prophets; those immutable laws that can be altered neither by the passions nor by the ignorance of man; but the passion that ignores them, and the ignorance that does not observe causes and does not foresee effects, have said, in the folly of their heart: "Everything comes from chance; a blind fatality pours good and evil upon the earth, without prudence or knowledge being able to preserve themselves from it." Or taking a hypocritical language, they have said: "Everything comes from God; he takes pleasure in deceiving wisdom and confounding reason......"; and ignorance has applauded itself in its malignancy. "Thus," it said, "I will equal myself to the science that wounds me; I will make useless the prudence that fatigues and annoys me; and