This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this
spirit through all the political part. Plots, massacres,
assassinations seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a
revolution. Cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty appear
flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of
scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand
spectacle to rouse the imagination grown torpid with the lazy
enjoyment of sixty years' security and the still unanimating repose of
public prosperity. The preacher found them all in the French
Revolution. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame.
His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when he arrives at his
peroration it is in a full blaze. Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his
pulpit, the free, moral, happy, flourishing and glorious state of
France as in a bird's-eye landscape of a promised land, he breaks
out into the following rapture: What an eventful period is this! I
am thankful that I have lived to it; I could almost say, Lord, now
lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen
thy salvation.- I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge, which
has undermined superstition and error.- I have lived to see the rights
of men better understood than ever; and nations panting for liberty
which seemed to have lost the idea of it.
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